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Unknown A
If the truth is on your side, why lie? The Hawaiian people were screwed over. Annexation shouldn't have happened. That's just a fact. Right, so then why do they. Why lie about, like, oh, the missionaries forced their Christianity on us. And, like, why. Why lie about that when it's. The truth is fine? Yeah. Nobody called it the bayonet constitution until decades afterwards. And today we call it the bayonet constitution. And there's this whole mythos that came up around it where the king was forced to sign this at gunpoint at the point of a bayonet. And that's why it's called the bayonet. And that's not true. That didn't happen at all. Sure. But still today it's the bayonet constitution.
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Unknown B
And it dilutes the impact of the word. Right. Racist was used so aggressively to the point that, like, a lot of Republicans are like, yeah, I am racist, because it doesn't mean anything now.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown B
Which is the worst outcome? Hi, guys, and welcome to another episode of Bridges. Today we are joined by Knowing better, a history YouTuber. Um, you are one of my favorite channels that I found. I, like, have been binging your content, specifically, the. One of my favorite parts about your content is the creativity with how you tell the history story. The different scenes that you pull in, even, like, the little subtle details. Like when you had the Kellogg's episode, you had, like, corn flakes in the background. And you, like, design your set to reflect the theme of, like, what you're talking about. And then you also did some crazy stuff where you had, like, a TV at one point and you were, like, talking within the tv.
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Unknown A
Still do. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Ye do, like, a lot of really creative stuff. Do you have, like, a big production team or what's. Is it just you?
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Unknown A
It's just me. It's just me. I do all the research, writing, filming, and editing. I have some assistants that help me find research assistants that help me find images or sources that kind of stuff that I don't have access to because I'm not an academic anymore. But for the most part, it's all me. Yeah, it's.
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Unknown B
Wow, that's crazy. How much time. So if an episode is like, well, episode. If a video that you put out is an hour and a half on a topic, how much time do you think you spend making that video?
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Unknown A
Probably over 500 hours. Yeah, they've. Every video seems to get longer and longer for me. Used to be every two weeks, then every month. Now I'm doing every, like, three or four, sometimes five months. So it does take five, 600 hours to make a video.
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Unknown C
Yeah, it's a pretty brave name, knowing better.
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Unknown A
Oh, well, it seems a lot of.
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Unknown C
Correctness on your part.
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Unknown A
Well, it was a play on the GI Joe thing of now you know, and knowing is half the battle. And I was like, well, I'm not explaining the entirety. You won't know everything, but you will know better.
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Unknown C
Okay, gotcha.
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Unknown B
Interesting.
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Unknown C
When you. When you go to select topics for videos and everything, what is your process for deciding you're going to choose a video? And then how often does that come to fruition? Do you ever, like, choose a topic and you get like, 30 minutes in and you're like, this is dumb. Or like, like a few weeks in?
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Unknown A
Sorry.
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Unknown C
Normally we don't have the window.
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Unknown A
I'm also sitting here like, yeah, no, you're good.
-
Unknown C
Normally the windows aren't open, but the apartment unit is working on the AC for a few days.
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Unknown B
So that's them out for, like. They're like.
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Unknown C
They'll be done in five minutes anyway.
-
Unknown B
Very cute. If you want to watch.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
So how do you pick topics? When you pick one, do you usually stick with all the way through or.
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Unknown A
Yeah, well, I do have a list, as many YouTubers do, but I haven't really consulted it in a long time because the videos just sort of come to me naturally now. They just sort of feed off of each other. So I've been doing, like, a religion series. So I did Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists. Like, that order was already in my head. When it comes to, like, other topics, like, say, my next one on Hawaii, that was just sort of a natural. Like, okay, I saw the someone's tiny, tiny desk performance, and at the end of it, she lists off a bunch of places. Free Palestine, Free God. I want to say she said Sudan, but I don't remember. Anyway, free Guam, Free Hawaii and all that. And a lot of people were like, wait, free Hawaii. I'm like, that's my next video.
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Unknown C
All right, so for Free Sudan, it was probably. What's the name of the place to the east of it? Because isn't there a country that was like a breakaway? Oh, maybe I think of Somali and Somaliland maybe.
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Unknown A
Possibly. Anyway, she listed off a bunch of stuff, leaving out Tibet, of course. Right.
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Unknown C
And what do you mean, of course?
-
Unknown A
Well, because she probably never heard about that on TikTok, so. Oh, okay, gotcha.
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Unknown C
Implying a political bend there.
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Unknown B
That's a spicy taste.
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Unknown A
You know, when you. When you talk to Zoomers about the various places they want to free Tibet doesn't usually make it on the list. And when you bring up Tibet, they say, well, they're better off now. All the things they say are not proper arguments for any other place.
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Unknown B
Crazy.
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Unknown A
Imagine if you're like, they're better off now. They were living under a religious theocracy before, blah, blah. And while I may not like a religious theocracy, I don't see how you can point to that and be like, that one's good, but these other ones. All these other ones are bad. Right?
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Colonization is good when you like it.
-
Unknown A
So anyway, that's what caused my Hawaii pick for the next video.
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Unknown B
Interesting. So I don't know how much you can foreshadow, but would you say the Free Hawaii movement is, like, rooted in a, like, understandable kind of, like, concern about colonization, or does it seem like it's based on, like, a lot of.
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Unknown A
Faux history, I would have to say.
-
Unknown B
Or is it a bad question?
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Unknown C
Or even before we. What is. What is free Hawaii? Free from who?
-
Unknown A
Right. What is it? Yeah, so I guess the. The. The Free Hawaii movement is to get Hawaii out of the United States of America. I guess that's the loftier goal. Right. Some of them want a specific part. You know, this area is ours. Like a reservation, sort of. Some of them want federal recognition, but the overall movement is against that because if we become. We speaking for them, if we become federally recognized under the United States, yeah, that's how it'll be. So they're kind of holding out for everything, Right. They just want all of it. So that's the goal. How Hawaii became part of the United States is incredibly complicated. We all know Native American history. We are all told those stories about, you know, the Pilgrims and the Trail of Tears and the smallpox blankets and the Wounded Knee. Like, we all know. We know all those stories, right?
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Unknown A
And so that gets transplanted onto Hawaii. And we think that what happened to the Cherokee and the Sioux happened to Hawaii when that isn't actually the case. For most of Hawaiian history, Hawaii was an independent kingdom.
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Unknown C
So the people are also Polynesian, right? Correct. They're not. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Yeah, correct. So, like, in 1819, they abolished their own religion. They. They. It's called the Kapu system. King Kamehameha, the first united the islands in a very bloody war. Then he died and his son took over. And according to the old system, that meant all land would be redivided and. And go to the different chiefs and stuff. And he was like, no, we're not doing that anymore. No more religion. Because it's all. It's all the same.
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Unknown B
Like the religion.
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Unknown A
Religion, yeah. Religion was politics, it was the economy, it was recreation, it was everything. So they abolished it.
-
Unknown B
What was their religion?
-
Unknown A
It was called the Kapu system. The Kapu system, the Tahitian equivalent, is taboo. You're probably more familiar with the word taboo. So they abolished it. And then like four or five months later, Protestant missionaries showed up. And unlike the Pilgrims, when these missionaries showed up, the people literally had no religion because they had abolished it. They tore down their own temples, they burned the idols, all of that. They got rid of everything. They did that themselves before missionaries showed up. And that alone, like, blows up everything you've learned about, like, the Cherokee and the Sioux, where they were forced into schools to Christianize them and all that. That didn't happen in Hawaii. And America had no power, so they couldn't have forced Hawaii to do that either. That was all them. Right. And this is 1819. The newest state was like, Maine. We hadn't even crossed the Mississippi yet.
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Unknown A
Like, we had no territorial ambitions for an island on the other side of the world. So, you know, they abolished their own religion. The. The monarchy had been in incested so long that Kamehameha the First was the first and only monarch to have children. Actually.
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Unknown B
Like, they were just so. Like, their genes were so damaged from.
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Unknown A
Incestuous relationships, a lot of them just straight up couldn't have kids. Wow. And then a few of them would, but they. They die at a few months or a few days, that kind of stuff. Yeah. When Kamehameha the First became king, no future monarch had kids. They were all his. His sons, cousins or nephews, I should say, or distant relations that were elected king. So that happened. And white people, not only from America, but Britain, France, Germany, they were all living in Hawaii, and the king made them citizens, gave them land, all that kind of stuff. And over time, they grew their political power and they were elected to the legislature and stuff. And the legislature is the one that overthrew the queen. Right. So, you know, imagine you're some third country, and in America, Congress overthrew the president and they both look to you saying, help us figure this out.
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Unknown A
Like, who are you going to side with? Congress or the president or the king or queen in this case. Right. Like, what do you do here? And that was a huge debate in America for like five or six years before they finally. They finally took it. And the only reason they took it was the Spanish American War. Aside from that it wouldn't have happened.
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Unknown C
So can I ask a random seafaring question? How the. I didn't even understand this when the Polynesians said, how do they find Hawaii? It's like a little thing, like way out in the middle of nowhere.
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Unknown A
Right. So this is, this is a topic that will make some people mad. Right.
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Unknown B
Did they know that the island was there?
-
Unknown A
Obviously not. How would you know? Right, right. I mean, so the, the story is that the Polynesians are these expert celestial navigators. Right. Which on its face, I mean. Sure, right, great. But how do you think, like the Europeans got there? Were they using gps? They were also using celestial navigation. Right. So it's not like this was unique.
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Unknown C
There's a very weird phenomenon. God, I saw this. Somebody gave this like 5 second explanation or whatever, like 10 years ago, and it stuck with me forever. Where once you removed enough from people, historically, they become aliens or barbarians. And every single thing they do is just like. It's simultaneously incredibly condescending and patronizing while also trying to be nice at the same time. So it'll be a thing where it's like, yeah, these people were expert navigators. They knew that the stars stayed in the same place in the sky. And it's like, yeah, they weren't on TikTok all day. Every single human being on the planet probably to some extent realize that the stars are about. They look in the sky all day, there's no light pollution or anything. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, that, that kind of thing happens a lot. Was like they knew how to make things out of animal furs and it's like, yeah, probably the very first person ever to a goat's hair fall off weave somebody.
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Unknown C
Yeah, but yeah, I hear those types of things. That trope, like, comes up a lot.
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Unknown A
So, I mean, the story is that of course they knew it was there. Right. But the reality, you can't navigate to somewhere if you don't know where it exists.
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Unknown B
Wait, what's the story? I don't, because I'm not. I'm Canadian. So you can assume I know nothing about the Hawaii. Why would people assume that they knew it was there?
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Unknown C
Well, so the people in Hawaii are the Polynesian people that come from areas around like. Is that around like New Zealand, Indonesia.
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Unknown A
In that area, or Hawaii, Tahiti. New Zealand. Oh, okay.
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Unknown C
And Tahiti is.
-
Unknown A
It's like closer to South America.
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Unknown C
Okay, well, me, I didn't even know it was the origination because the Maui people are Polynesian as well.
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Unknown A
Right? There are no Maui people. I don't know what that. Yeah. No.
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Unknown C
What does that mean?
-
Unknown A
That's not a. That's not a. I mean, there's an island called Maui.
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Unknown B
Do you mean Maori people?
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Unknown A
Maori. Oh, New Zealand.
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Unknown C
New Zealand, Yeah. My bad.
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Unknown B
Oh, yeah.
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Unknown C
That's where all my knowledge are. Pond.
-
Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown C
I didn't know if you're making some huge, huge political statement. I was like, new Zealand's on really good terms with their indigenous people. Okay. Jesus Christ. Okay. Maori.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
Not Maui. Okay, Sorry. Because Maui is an island. Hawaii. Okay. But, yeah. Okay, so these were. The Polynesian people, originated from Tahiti, and they were able to find impossibly small islands and a huge, vast sea of. And this is when they didn't have, like, massive ships or anything.
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Unknown A
So.
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Unknown C
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Okay. Yeah, well, okay, So, I mean, what the migration pattern was from Asia. I don't know how the camera. Okay, anyway, Asia to Tahiti, and then from Tahiti back. That's how. That's how it worked.
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Unknown C
The question, I guess, when I'm asking, like, how can they find it? Like, I see somebody, like, I'm gonna take a ship out into the middle of this vast body of water, and there's like a.99.9% just, like, die. But maybe I find a really small island that no one's ever heard of before. Is that, like, how it worked or.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
So just almost everyone died, and then a couple really lucky people were like, an island.
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Unknown A
Well, I wouldn't be able to tell you how many people died.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
Oh, of course. And we don't hear stories about the people who don't come back. Sure. Really? Right. So we can't really know how many, but you can assume. Right. There's no way that they left from an island and sailed directly to Hawaii. And they were like, boom, here it is. Of course, like, dozens of people went out before they. You know, finally.
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Unknown B
So did the. Did the. Oh, my mind is blanking. The Protestant missionaries to. The missionaries know the island existed by the time they got there.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Okay, so the missionaries didn't stumble upon it.
-
Unknown A
Correct.
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Unknown B
The Polynesians.
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Unknown A
Yeah. So Hawaii was discovered in seven. Discovered for the third time in September 7, September 1778. 1778. By Captain Cook.
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Unknown B
What do you mean by third? So third is obviously white people. First would be.
-
Unknown A
Okay, so Hawaii was found three separate times. The first time Vikings. The first time was around 500 AD by people from the Marquesas Islands. And then about 1500 or 1200 people from Tahiti came and. And they conquered the islands. And that's how it was when white people showed up in 1778.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
So it was a third time. So it was discovered in 1778. And almost immediately British and American and. And. And French traders were showing up. So they were getting contact. But we're talking like you can count how many ships there were on one hand every year until the 1820s when whaling picked up. And that's when. When everything started. So, yeah, they. They showed up in 1820 intentionally. Because actually, actually there was a guy named Henry Obukia. He was a Hawaiian, and he joined a sailing crew to escape Kamehameha's war. And he found himself in Boston, where he went to a bunch of missionaries and said, please come to Hawaii and civilize our islands. And he is the reason why the ABCFM sent the missionaries to Hawaii.
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Unknown B
Interesting.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And so Hawaiians got rid of their own religion because they didn't want to fracture again. Did they take to Christianity kind of welcomely? Like they were very open to it?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, almost immediately.
-
Unknown B
Why were they open to it after they just got rid of their religion?
-
Unknown A
Because they had been seeing all these white people breaking their rules in the Kapu system. Like, women weren't allowed to eat bananas or pig or these certain berries. You weren't allowed to cross shadows with a chief. Stuff like that. You weren't allowed to catch a fish out of.
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Unknown B
Very restrictive.
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Unknown A
Right. And the punishment for all of that was death. There was no, like, finger cutting off or. It was death even for, like, the.
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Unknown B
Woman eating a banana.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
Wow. How can you afford to kill so many people? What is the population of this place.
-
Unknown A
Gotta be like 500 people, right? No. At the time of Captain Cook's arrival was around 300,000. Jesus.
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Unknown C
That's way bigger than I would assume. Okay.
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Unknown A
And these people didn't have diseases. They didn't have smallpox or flu or anything. So their kids weren't dying. So if they weren't doing this, they'd probably hit civilizational collapse. Just. Yeah. So in a roundabout way, it was kind of a population control thing.
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Unknown C
But incest.
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Unknown A
The kings, the incest. Yeah. It was only among the chiefs. Okay. Yeah.
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Unknown B
There was no trickle down of, like, incestuousness being.
-
Unknown A
Well, I mean, there's many of them on the commoners maybe, but there's no.
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Unknown B
Viewed as a. Like a sacrilege, like a bad thing that was occurring. Or was it. Just kind of assumed it was.
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Unknown A
So among the chiefs, they believed in mana. That's actually where. I'd never known where mana came from. I thought it was just a Video game stat, you know, But.
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Unknown B
But like M A N A.
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Unknown A
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They. They believed in mana, and when you kill someone, you get their mana. So once you have the mana in you, the only way to keep it in your bloodline is to be with your sister, and that keeps your mana pure, and your child will be even more spiritually powerful than you. And. Yeah, that's.
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Unknown B
So it was mostly siblings.
-
Unknown A
They tried to. That would have been the. The highest possible. Okay. But then it would be cousins and that sort of thing.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
But they took to Christianity because they had seen all these white people eating bananas and fishing and doing all the stuff that they're not allowed to do. And the volcanoes weren't exploding. Nothing was happening. And also they started dying of smallpox and flu and all that, whereas the white people weren't. So they were like, there must be something to that religion that's keeping them safe. Right? Yeah. And so they. They took to it really quickly. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Interesting. That's really similar to. I'm sure you're aware of this. Like, the story of, like, why the Vikings kind of embraced Christianity is because some missionary. I don't even know if this is true. It's the folklore, but a missionary went out to this, like, sacred tree. I think it was like, Zeus's tree. And if you touched it, they were like, zeus will strike you down. And he. Well, not Zeus. What would it be? Thor. Thor. What was the Viking version? Was it Thor?
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Unknown A
Odin.
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Unknown B
Odin. Thank you. And a missionary just, like, went out and chopped down the tre. Tree. And they're like, well, I guess your God's stronger than Odin.
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Unknown C
So imagine if he would have been unlucky and gotten struck by lightning or had, like, a stroke or a seizure.
-
Unknown B
Or the tree, like, fell on him or something.
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Unknown C
The Vikings would have been. That was a forever religion at that point.
-
Unknown B
It's a forever religion. Okay.
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Unknown A
Something very similar happened in Hawaii, actually. A queen named Kapiolani went down to this. The volcano crater, Pele's volcano, and she openly defied her by throwing berries and all kinds of. It was. It's a very important moment that's very well documented. Kapiolani's. Dang it. Now I'm. Now I'm forgetting the word. But her defiance, you know.
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Unknown B
Yeah. I called Odin Zeus. So you're getting. You don't have to worry about it.
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Unknown C
As you've kind of dug through, I guess, historical things and you've done reading and research and you've published videos. What do you think are some of the largest two categories? What are some of the largest, untrue things that we've just kind of heard, like, passed down, where it's like. Like in English class, like, the knight's armor was so heavy, if they fell over, they were stuck forever like that. Yeah.
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Unknown B
We were just talking about this before we started filming.
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Unknown C
Yeah, like that kind of thing. And then what are a couple that are, like, meaningfully like, this probably has an influence in our mind, and it's really sad that we think this.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
First category, fun things.
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Unknown A
Let me come back to that. Let me hit the other one. I think one of the biggest misconceptions, one of my biggest historical pet peeves, is the way we sort of visualize the past. So I don't know if you've seen, like, Moana or. You have, Right. Okay, so it's a nice nuclear family. There's a chief dad and a wife, you know, and. And two kids and, like a dog. Right. It's a very nuclear family. And we have this perception throughout all of history, really. Whenever you try to imagine 1200s France, you think, okay, nuclear family, but no computer, phone, tv, and maybe grandma and.
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Unknown B
Grandpa live in the house.
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Unknown A
Yeah. You, like, subtract things that, you know, didn't exist, but you still sort of keep the same, like, yeah, nuclear families and. And, you know, you meet your neighbors and all, and it's like, no, none of that. Like, we were living 20, 30 people to a house. We're all sleeping on the same floor. Like, this nuclear family thing is very new, but it's something I have tackled in, like, every single video. I'm talking about the Pilgrims, and there's all this media of, like, nice nuclear families sitting there eating with Indians and stuff. And it's like, this isn't. It gives. It gives people the impression. Well, it helps. It helps reinforce the idea that modern morality can be applied to the past. You know, if they live just like us, just without this, this, this and this. So they must have had the same values similarly, which is not the case, like, throughout most of history, really.
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Unknown C
I think this is destructive too, because it inhibits our ability to understand how we could make missteps. Because when you look at the past kind of retrospectfully like that, it's very obvious what the right thing should have been. And everybody on the wrong side of the issue should have known. So they were bad people. And if that issue ever came up in our society, we would obviously be on the right side because we wouldn't be stupid enough to be pro slavery or anti women voting or Pro Nazareth or obviously make the right choice. But yeah, the misconceptualizing of what the past looked like leads people to have bad ideas of what the future could look like.
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Unknown A
Or the idea that the past was like, nice and tidy. We seem to think that right now is just crazy complicated and politicians can't seem to work together on anything. But really, that's always been the case. Like, I'm, like, I'm researching Hawaii right now, so it's on my mind. But like I. Like I said, it took them five or six years of debating back and forth as to whether Hawaii should be because, well, it'll hurt the Louisiana sugar growers and all this other stuff. And it was voted down. Hawaii was not going to be part of the US and then a few months later, Spanish American War happened. But, like, none of this is clean. None of it. It wasn't like, civil war ended and immediately they passed the, the anti slavery amendment and the voting amendment and all that. No, that happened years afterwards and took a long time.
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Unknown A
All these debates and all kinds of, you know, police actions and new rule, all kinds of stuff that just makes it way more complicated. And I think that plays into what you were talking about before we started about just having to learn dates. Right. You just learn that this passed on this year. This passed on this year. You don't learn, like, why or why there's this huge gap between them or anything like that.
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Unknown C
One thing I tell people to do sometimes is like, imagine, like, you're 50 years forward and what will be written about right now, like, the whole ordeal of COVID and the 2007 crash. And like January 6th, these things might be a paragraph in a social studies book, like, at the end too, because you don't even really get to modern history much in your high school and. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Grad school.
-
Unknown C
Yeah. So a thing that you lived through. And there's going to be a moment in everybody that's listening these lives where they've got a child who comes and like, hey, what do they mean here when they said that there was a. There was a riot at the Capitol? What do they mean here when they said you guys had Covid and you were inside for a long time and you're gonna be reading that book? Like, no, my God, you don't. They're missing so much here. Like, this was so horrible and it was. And they're saying that the US did this, but every single state was different. And sometimes places in the states and it's like. And it's funny because we'll look at that. But then, like you said, people will go back and like, oh, England was like this everywhere.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown C
And even today, people will do it where I'll be like, you can talk to a guy who's lived in London his whole life, who might not be able to tell you anything about London because he only lived in one neighborhood. You know, people that like, live. I'm from Chicago. Really? Motherfucker. How long. Where do you live? Yeah, I'm from a suburb an hour and a half outside of Chicago. Okay, thank you. Yeah, right. Like even in the. Just happened.
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Unknown B
So, yeah, one of the, one of the things you pointed out in your vegan video that I thought was really interesting because I think about presitism a lot and how this idea that we think the history was so clear and direct and simple, I think it also leads to people thinking that the future is so simple and direct and clear. Right. I think a lot of people, when they see certain people getting elected, they see kind of the snap, right. That's happening worldwide in democracies. So, like, yeah, but like, you know, democracy will be fine. And it's like, well, you shouldn't assume that. Right. Like, the actions of all of us collective individuals will decide the future history of whether that is fine, whether democracy weathers the next, like 100 years. I remember you saying, one of my biggest fears is always, like, being on the wrong side of history.
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Unknown B
And I found it really interesting. In your vegan video, are you talking about if you were anti slavery, pro women's suffrage, you're also probably a vegan, right?
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Unknown A
Yeah, the Omni cause. Yeah, yeah, that's sort of always been. I mean, we sort of joke about it now, but even back then, like, if you were anti slavery, if you were pro feminist, we're talking 1800s feminist, you were probably a vegetarian. Yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown B
And it creates such this interesting level of being on the right side of history. What does that actually, like, mean or like, like, it creates this spectrum for me of like, where's like, all the neutral people? Because probably there was a lot of neutral people that were like, open to, like, women voting, but they had some concerns and they're like, open to ending slavery, but they had some concerns about, like, civil War and all that sort of thing. And it makes you go like, how do you look at these people and like, understand it in a way that doesn't just immediately more. Because when people talk about this, even me saying, like, people being open minded about slavery, they're gonna just think, well, they were horrible people. And it's like, well, they were probably mostly normal people.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
How do you engage with history without like judging it morally?
-
Unknown A
You know, I, I don't have a hard time with that. I. When I guess it's just because of how much I've studied that I know sort of the general attitude of what was going on at the time that, you know, everyone imagines that, you know, if they were back then in the 1860s, they would have been against slavery, right?
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Unknown C
I would have been.
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Unknown A
Okay. I mean, would you give up meat? I mean, that's definitely possible, you know, but, but they, they aren't willing to entertain the idea that they might have, you know, the wrong view. I mean, I had some wrong views 10 years ago. So it's very easy for me to imagine that if I was in the 1850s, I'd probably feel the same way as most of the people living around me, because that's just how it is. Right. But this also plays into like determinism. A lot of people, they look at the world as it is right now and this is how it was supposed to be. All of those decisions leading up that was supposed to happen that way. Right. There's no, well, it could have happened or should have happened differently. It's all of that was leading to this point and, and I want to go to Mars.
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Unknown A
So these are the steps that we're going to take to get there. Because I'm determined that this is where humanity should go, right. When, you know, I wish it was that easy, that we could just define a goal and move towards it. Right. But most people just, they just want to grill. You know, they sit home and watch tv, raise their kids. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown C
I think it's a really important. I don't, I think Aquinas was the guy that had a bunch of like syllogistic arguments for God. I think it's the teleological argument is the idea that, yeah, the people will say that like the planet Earth is the perfect distance from the sun for life. And so if it wasn't here, like, everything would be horrible. And it's like, it's similar to saying that like, what are the chances that this puddle of water is the exact same shape as the puddle does the puddle shaped hole that isn't like, well, that's the shape that it would be there. But like. Yeah, but it could be different. Like, who's to say that, you know, the Earth looks the way that it does now, but it could be totally different closer or further from who's to say what it could have looked like.
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Unknown C
And right now where you exist, you know, like, yeah, history is good and it's always been this way and we're in this area and that's great. And it's like, well, that's, you know, you say that now, but if you. Somebody starving to death in the holodomor and you're coming to the end of your life, like, wow, wow, history really fucked me over here. Or if you're in the Holocaust or if you're a Native Indian, Native American, you're like, fuck. You know, so, yeah, people are very even. Call it presentism or people are born to a certain area and kind of what you said, like, you probably have the morals of people around you. It's funny that a person would be like, yeah, like, I think I've got the correct moral answer objectively. And it's like, wow, how convenient for you that it just so happens to match with every single person that's living around you.
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Unknown C
What are the chances of that? You know, like, congratulations. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
I think one of the big issues that I have when you, when it comes to debating current day stuff, this comes up so much, maybe in every topic. I guess I wouldn't consider myself having seriously read anything until like a year ago. So just catching up on actually understanding anything. But for like Ukraine, Russia or for Israel, Palestine, when you listen to people talk about these things, a lot of their modern justifications kind of come from the mythos of the past.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown C
So some of these historical narratives are almost necessarily normatively loaded because people will draw modern day ethical justification for their actions from the kind of mythos of the past. And so if these facts were different or if they weren't morally tainted, they would lose, I guess, some of the righteous power that they have today, which is. Yeah, right, right.
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Unknown A
Well, it's sort of a selective fact choosing, I guess, depending on who.
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Unknown C
Yeah, right.
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Unknown A
I mean, you mentioned Israel, Palestine. They often leave out that Jews were kicked out of every country around the area. You know, that kind of stuff. It's. And I'm seeing this with Hawaii as well. They just sort of leave out the inconvenience. Yeah, the. Yeah. Whereas if they had included that, like, we could have a discussion about this. Right. You know, like, okay, here's. This is what happened and we can figure out where to move from here. But if it's a no, I want this because of this story I heard on Twitter.
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Unknown C
You know, like, it's annoying too, because it's like, like these things, they don't Even take away from your argument. So you shouldn't have to make this up. Some conservatives, I think, I don't know, if candidates don't say, there's Other people will say things like, well, black people's lives in the United States are better than they would have been in Africa. Right. And it's tempting to fight against that point, but it's also like, okay, so what? Yeah, maybe that's true. Like, Bill Gates could maybe capture like homeless children and lock them up in his home for 10 years and raise them. But that, that's not a justification for the accident.
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Unknown B
Justifying being like, yeah, but the kids who come out of. Really appreciate being alive.
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Unknown C
Didn't you know Einstein was baby. Well, me, I guess now my whole position has changed. Yeah, it's such an. It's. You don't even have to fight that argument. Yes, it's very annoying to see people try to rewrite history because I think they have to to maintain what should otherwise be like a morally acceptable path.
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Unknown A
Yeah. My first thesis, my working thesis on the Hawaii video was, if history, if the truth is on your side, why lie? Like there's there the Hawaiian people were screwed over. Annexation shouldn't have happened. That's just a fact. Right. So then why do they. Why lie about like, oh, the missionaries forced their Christianity on us. And like, why, why lie about that when it's served from narrative?
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Unknown B
Fine, yeah, yeah, it's that, like, narrative serving that, like, in many ways it creates, like, when I hear people who are like, really distrustful of these types of narratives and they'll point to all the lies, I'll be like, I, I agree that those are lies. Right. That doesn't mean that, like, maybe the whole idea that they're talking about is incorrect. But yeah, those are lies. And it's, it's so frustrating because I feel like at least somebody who, like, advocates on the left, like, the left does this a lot where they kind of like somewhat pick and pull and recreate certain mythos and I'm sorry, the right.
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Unknown C
Absolutely. That's.
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Unknown A
Oh, yeah, right. I already said to the right.
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Unknown B
I already said I'm, I'm being critical of the. Because I'm left leaning right. Like, I want, I want left ideas to, like, succeed. And so, like, when I see it happening on the left, I'm just like, oh, like, why? We don't even need to lie. Like, we just don't need to lie about these things. Right. When it comes to studying history, how do you recommend somebody even start. Like, how do you Approach studying history and thinking about it in a good way.
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Unknown A
You have to read books. There's anything else is just a pale substitute. Documentaries, any. All that stuff. You have to read books. That's the only way to do it. I, I tried to do it without books for a long time, but once I started, I want to say, I want to say the Scientology video is the first time I read a book for a video. Everything else was sort of like articles on the Internet or Wikipedia even. But now it's books. And every video, there are more and more books. So far I've read seven books for Hawaii, and I think I did, like eight for Seventh Day Adventists, something like that. But that's the only way. It's the only way. I wish there was some other way. I really do, but that's it.
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Unknown B
How do you vet books? How do you know which book is good?
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Unknown A
Now that. That's a difficult question because it requires critical thinking. Right? You have to be able to. And I don't think critical thinking is a skill that can be taught. Jesus. I don't think so. So how do you know whether a source is good or not? I'll give you an example from the book I was just reading. The guy says that when Vancouver arrived in Hawaii, he promised the king that he would send teachers of his religion. And so when the missionaries showed up in 1820, the Hawaiians were confused because they were expecting British missionaries, not American missionaries. That was the quote. And as soon as I read it, I was like, that doesn't sound right. And does it here in what? The missionary showed up in 1820.
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Unknown C
Okay, right.
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Unknown A
So right away I was like, that doesn't sound right to me. There's something about that sentence that just is off. And I wouldn't be able to articulate to someone else why that is, except to say that I know Vancouver came in 1794. So you're telling me they waited 26 years and they were expecting a different accent?
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Unknown C
Okay, so, okay, so I'm agreeing and disagreeing with some things you're saying. Unfortunately, people will ask me when it comes to news, like, how do you know what a good source is? Or how do you know what to read? Or whatever. And I say this now. I, I. So I started taking Vyvanse at the end of 2023. So that's why I say last year is the first time I'm able to sit down and, like, read, like, a full book, a full article, a full, like, long stuff. And my answer, I realized, is that, like, there is no shortcut for knowing the material. Yeah, because once you know the material, there's just, there's something to be said for having like a working vocabulary and knowledge. And we intuitively know this because like, like, do you play video games at all?
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Unknown A
Oh, ye.
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Unknown C
Like any FPS games or whatever? Yeah, yeah. Like if I were to come up to you. We do this with parents. Like, oh, is that, Is that Call of Duty on the Nintendo that you got? You hear one thing and you instantly know. Or if somebody comes up to you, like, oh, that's a good computer. How much memory do you have in that? What are you even asking me? Right?
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Unknown B
Immediately.
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Unknown C
No, but the only reason why those, those sentences seem so simple and easy, it's like, okay, we just have to remember this and that. No, no, no, no, no, no. What happens is you have such a fluid understanding of all of the underlying facts that there is a semantic, there's a vocabulary that develops in knowing these things. And then you immediately, you immediately will have an idea of what's right or what's wrong. I don't read books and topics now that I know a lot about. And I'm like, oh God, I don't know if the source is good or not. I know what a lot of the primary and secondary sources say, so I know if it's going to be bullshit or not. Like, if somebody brings up a particular thing about like, Israel, Palestine, they'll say things like, oh, the United States supported Israel since the very beginning.
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Unknown C
And it's like There are like 25 different reasons why I know that can't possibly be true. Okay, The US Wasn't even taking fucking Jews from the Holocaust and you're telling me they supported Israel? Or like people say things like, yeah, Israel was supported in 19, in the, in the 30s and 40s, where everyone's like, Israel wasn't a fucking country yet. Right? And then much like what you say, like, that sentence can't be true. You describe it as critical thinking, but it's not even. It's just having familiarity with the source material. And there are some. Like, if you're willing to read a lot of articles or watch like good link documentaries or read like these huge fucking wiki articles, I think you can kind of get there. I don't think there's a shortcut for books and all. Ultimately all of them are sourcing off of books.
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Unknown C
But if all you've engaged with are headlines or like tweets, you're lost. You have no. Somebody could tell you literally anything about a thing And I'm sure that when you've gotten the familiarity with it, you can tell very quickly, like, this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Almost immediately when, like, you just a simple. Yeah, sorry, there's a million examples. I could go. But, like, I'm sure you can think of it with the Hawaii stuff and everything else. Someone will say something. It's like, this is. You have no idea what you're talking about.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are a lot of sovereignty activist documentaries related to Hawaii. And yes, that would happen a lot where as soon as someone would start talking, they'd say something that's just a little like, they use just the wrong term, the slightly wrong term. And you're like, this person's a moron. I probably shouldn't have said that.
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Unknown C
You know, not a moron, but they clearly are. What they have doesn't. It's not working.
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Unknown B
They're not an expert. They're not an expert to be listened to.
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Unknown C
There's an interesting thing that happened where, when I didn't know anything about science, I had heard, like, I figured that, like, oh, scientists know all the answers or whatever. And then kind of like you learn a bit and there's this understanding of, like, if you believe in a thing, you can find a study to support everything and you can find any fact to support anything ever. But then when you read more, it's like, no, there's a lot of convergence in most fields. Unless it's like a cutting, like, cutting edge new idea. Or when a scientist says something like, we have like, science, like, especially depending on. They need to stop fucking doing this. But scientists will say, like, we have no idea how anesthesia works. And when they say this, they're hitting it like the most fundamental, fundamental, fundamental, like, like, they'll say like, oh, yeah, like ketamine slows down, like the neurotransmission.
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Unknown C
All these parts of the brains that we believe and they're like, we don't really know how that works. But when somebody hears that we don't know how it works, they think they're like, just injecting a random thing. Your body's like, the guy's not saying anything, so let's go. Yeah, so same thing with, generally with history. There's one, there are people that study it professionally. They speak the languages, they go to the archives of those governments, they dig through and they do a lot of work and research to get this stuff down. And then two, there are a ton of other people that, you know, secondary and tertiary people that will compile it and look at. And there's usually a convergence in the field with some things that will be controversial, but rarely will it be as controversial as, like, there's a 50 year difference between these two things, or nobody knew.
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Unknown C
Generally, I think when I hear people that are well studied or well versed in an area debating a thing, they're not usually debating on like, is this fact true or not? They'll be debating on, like, what was the contribution of this particular thing or that particular thing to this.
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Unknown B
I was gonna say, in fact, that's a really good heuristic to even understand like a developing field. Like, the more divergent the camps are in a specific area of study, the more you know that that is a burgeoning area or an area that needs a lot more data. Because as you collect data, you tend toward the middle. So if you have an area of study or if you're looking at scientific papers and you realize that, that there's two very distinctive kind of mutually exclusive camps, that means you should be a lot more cautious in my mind at least about the whole topic. Because it's like, okay, even the experts aren't even, you know, aggregating towards a thing, which in most topics they are. But when they are divergent like that, that's where I think, like, that's the biggest cue to be most cautious about that topic. Because we really don't know.
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Unknown A
Right, right. That's typically why I don't do current topics as well. Because there's, well, they're, they're still happening and I won't be able to make a video about it until, you know, June or whatever. But. But also like the facts, you know, we could find out about some secret organization that was behind all of it two years from now. Right. So, like, I don't want to put something out there, be like, yes, this is how it's happening, this is what's going on, only to find out later that, you know, oh, there was stuff I didn't know about.
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Unknown C
Drats.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Darn. They were building tunnels. That's crazy.
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Unknown C
So what? I don't know if you answered my question, if you're dash or not going back. No, I'm just kidding. So what are a couple of big narrative things or big like historical facts where you think that people being misled or misunderstanding, this is manifesting in some very negative way today.
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Unknown A
I think the biggest one I can come up with is the convict leasing and stuff that happened after slavery ended. Because still today we have that 1350 meme you know, 13% of the population does 50% of the crime or something like that. Because there's this perception that black people are just more prone to criminality.
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Unknown B
What's convict leasing?
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Unknown A
Okay, so after slavery ended, there's still cotton and stuff that needed to be picked. Right. So the, the amendment abolishing slavery said that except for as punishment for a crime, so they would arrest people, charge them with a crime and sentence them to labor, and they. And they'd be put to work on a cotton field. I grew up learning that in elementary school and high school and all that. And in my mind it was murder, theft, that kind of stuff. And it wasn't until I read that book in 2020 or whatever, which book, if you could tell us Slavery by another name. Something like that. Yeah. Where I found out what the crimes were. And it was like trespassing. And by trespassing they mean walking alongside a railroad, whistling at a white woman. Just all kinds of. Just, just the pettiest stuff you could possibly imagine. Right.
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Unknown B
There's not enough and murderers to pick your field.
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Unknown A
Yes, yes. They had to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to dig up crimes on these people. And so while that's happening in the north, they're hearing about all these black people who are getting arrested for crimes and stuff. And so that's how this myth developed of them being more prone to criminality. I mean, I've walked alongside a railroad. I've. I've been unemployed. That was another one. Vagrancy was. They would arrest you for vagrancy. You know, slaves who were just freed, not having a job, especially because a.
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Unknown B
Lot of, if my understanding is correct, if I'm thinking about this correctly, most of the slaves that are freed are going to be in southern states that are highly racist as well. So the likelihood that you want to now employ somebody who five years ago, 10 years ago, was a slave would be very low. Right. And I, my understanding as well, the poor working white did a lot to try to prevent the poor attempting to work black communities from getting jobs as well, because they would be competing for the same labor jobs.
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Unknown C
And that competed or that continued all the way up through the fucking Civil Rights act there, where unions and people were trying to push black people out of working higher skilled labor because they don't want to compete with them.
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Unknown A
So that.
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Unknown C
Yeah, that's like in our very recent history.
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Unknown A
Yeah, right.
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Unknown B
And so they could be arrested for basically something that systemically was really hard to avoid, which is being unemployed.
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Unknown A
Right? Yeah, yeah. Being unemployed or Playing dice, You know, that kind of.
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Unknown C
Although in that case, I wouldn't even say that was systemic. I would say that was just a direct. You were a fucking slave a few years ago.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
Fuck, yeah.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. But then it continued with. With debt peonage, which was, you owe me money, so you'll work for me until it's paid off. But also while you're working for me, you have. You owe me rent and food and. Yeah. So just pile on. Right. So. But the convict leasing, I think that's. That's. I keep hitting the microphone. I think that's one of the biggest myths that still sort of affects us today. And you brought up earlier that, like, yeah, there's more. People will say, like, yeah, there's more crime in these neighborhoods, so we need to patrol these more. And if you go looking for a crime, you will find one. If. If a cop went to my hotel room right now, I'm sure he could find something, some reason to arrest me or give me a ticket or fine or something. If you want to find something, you will.
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Unknown C
I know where the party's at tonight. You get irritated from a historical perspective when one of the things that people seem to do is they'll. A thing can't be bad on its own, so they have to kind of call it by yes. Yeah. So like H1B stuff, people will call it, like, indentured servitude or modern slavery or. Yeah. Genocide or whatever. Like, terms get thrown around. Yeah.
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Unknown A
I mean, the genocide one is probably the biggest one. Sure.
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Unknown C
Trying to stay away from Israel, Palestine, because I want your audience to hate you. Because I'm like the pro genocide guys. I don't know if you've done, like, a lot of Israel, Palestine. I don't want to.
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Unknown B
When he says he's pro genocide, he's not pro genocide. Just to be very, very clear.
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Unknown A
Well, okay, I wasn't going to touch on that. You know, but like, the Hawaiians, they say that the. A lot of the Native Americans say that too. Where this word genocide. And I get where they're coming from, but genocide is also like a legally defined crime. Right. So aside from that. Yeah, the. I'm trying to think of another example where they put this. Oh, the bayonet constitution. In Hawaii in 1887, the legislature forced the king to sign a constitution that made it so that he couldn't appoint his own ministers. All kinds of stuff. Just a bunch of stuff that kneecapped the monarchy. Nobody called it the bayonet constitution until decades afterwards. And today we call it the bayonet constitution. And there's this whole mythos that came up around it where the king was forced to sign this at gunpoint at the point of a bayonet.
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Unknown A
And that's why it's called the bayonet. And that's not true. That didn't happen at all. There was definitely a threat, an implied threat of force, but he wasn't. The guns weren't pointed at him. Right. But still today it's the bayonet constitution. And if you Google it, you'll have all these stories about how guns were pointed at the guy. Nobody, not the Hawaiians, not the missionaries, not the white people said anything about guns.
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Unknown C
A recent history example that I'm kind of reminded of for this has to do with the crime bill because a lot. The 94 crime bill. 94 crime bill. Because a lot of people are under the assumption that that crime bill came and it was just like white people trying to put black people back in chains or whatever. And it was like everybody hated it. But like at the time, like crack. But crack epidemics and violence in especially black neighborhoods were like destroying African American communities. And like the Congressional Black Caucus was a huge advocate for that. Yes. Yeah. And it was a thing that everybody in America was like, we need to do something about our crime. And retrospectively there are aspects of that, I think like three strike laws and stuff where it's like, this is probably not good, but people will look at the impact after and they're like, oh, well, at the time they were trying to as race as possible and it's.
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Unknown A
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Comes.
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Unknown C
It happens a lot with the heart seller immigration bill too. They were trying to get all the Mexicans. Yeah, sorry. God.
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Unknown B
I was just gonna pause this. I think the dogs are gonna probably keep sponsoring the episode. Do you want me to just close the windows?
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Unknown C
If you want to. It's gonna get hot in here, though.
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Unknown B
It will get very hot.
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Unknown C
We haven't even started.
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Unknown A
Very hot.
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Unknown B
The lights are really warm. Yeah, no ac.
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Unknown C
No, it's good. We're fine, I think.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
I mean, I doubt the dog. You know what? Sulak is gonna kill me because I don't say anything. You guys keep do this. Don't hit the fucking table. Sulak's gonna kill me.
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Unknown B
Squeeze.
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Unknown C
You're probably all right, but closer.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, perfect.
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Unknown B
Sorry not to derail us. I was actually going to empathize a little bit with like going back to the. The genocide and even like what you're talking about, like viewing this Intention. I think I've been thinking a lot about people like, applying the word genocide or like these really morally loaded labels. Two situations. And I think part of while I think it's incorrect in that waters down and it dilutes the impact of the word. Right. To the point where racist was used so aggressively, to the point that, like, a lot of Republicans are like, yeah, I am racist, because it doesn't mean anything now.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown B
Which is the worst outcome for the word to mean. But I can also understand it because on the flip side, you've got years and years and years of basically most Americans, if we focus on, like, the merit the American issue, kind of putting a blind eye to the treatment of black people, to the fact that what was the last legal 1948 was the last legal black slave 1942. Right. And so how these issues are relevant and still impacting people today. And so I understand the emotional need. This is really common, for example, in trauma and cases of like. Like, for example. So one of the things that rape advocates will do with victims is they'll be like, it's really important that you don't embellish the story at all. Because a lot of victims actually often do when reporting to the police because they feel so emotionally distressed and they're worried that people won't take it seriously.
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Unknown B
Oftentimes understandably worried. But if they're caught legally embellishing the story now, they're not even a credible witness. Right. And so there's this. This inverse thing that you have to do with victims. We have to say, I understand the desire to blow the story bigger so people understand and resonate with the emotional impact. And also it, like, degrades the level of reliability people will give you in the future, which is this kind of this converse thing that's understandable where it's coming from. And it also destroys the messaging, which is really unfortunate.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I very much agree with that. I mean, we were talking about that with my old Columbus video, where it's like, a lot of people claim he's responsible for killing millions. And I was like, well, no, it's only hundred hundreds of thousands, which is still bad, but not. It's not embellished. Right. And it's again, if the truth is on your side, why lie about it? Now, I'd never heard that about rape victims, but that's interesting. And I. I can see where that comes from too. Yeah. Yeah.
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Unknown B
So I want to go back to critical thinking cannot be taught.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Why? I guess, first of all, what do you mean? By critical thinking. And why do you think it can't be taught?
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Unknown A
Well, I don't think it can be taught because you have to have that factual, you have that, have to have that base knowledge of stuff because you can't critically think about. And when I say critically think, I mean like apply it to other things. You know, like you read, you read this and you're like, oh yeah, that's kind of like this other country that did that or something. You relate it to other stuff and you can't do that unless you know about the other country. So it's really, you need a broad base of fact based knowledge in order for critical thinking to take place. Because if you have nothing to compare and contrast it to, then then you're not critically thinking, you're just, just absorbing.
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Unknown B
So then we were talking a bit before about that mental immunity movement and Julia Galef, how do you feel about like that scout mindset, the idea that essentially. Well, I would agree expertise can't be taught other than learning, right? There's no, there's no single trait, critical thinking that can just be taken and generally applied to all things.
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Unknown A
Right? If I were to, if I were to put on a college class called Critical Thinking 101, like what would the, what would that even. It would have to be like, okay, we're going to learn some facts and we're going to learn how to, how to distinguish them, right? Like you have to, you have to have something to work with.
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Unknown C
I feel like you have to have like, if I think of critical thinking, I'm thinking of like, like very baseline navigating stuff. So like, like a, like a propositional philosophy class where you can understand like an, like an argument is like this conclusion logically follows given these two premises are true. Understanding stuff like that and then understanding some basic stuff about statistics I think can help you kind of navigate some claims. But those two things that I just gave are a bit biased towards number things. And those can help you kind of evaluate whether you feel like somebody might be bullshitting on a claim without necessarily knowing about a thing. So a very common poor argument made is, here are two charts. I can show you that when person A has this quality, they're this high. But when person B has this quality, they're only this high.
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Unknown C
Really common one is marriage. Married men make way more money than single men, therefore. And then this is the trouble part, they'll say, therefore if you get married you'll make more money. But that jump is not even remotely supported by any of the data doesn't make any sense to even say that you don't have the causal link between the two. And there could be covariate factors where it's like. And it is the case that typically people get married once they hit, like, more stable financial positions. Right? Yeah, there's stuff like that. But unfortunately, this, the critical thinking stuff is going to be, I think, relatively unique to the field that you're talking about. So when it comes to history, I'm very critical. If somebody says they've written multiple books and they're a historian and a subject, but they don't speak the language because that means they've never consulted an original source in their entire life.
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Unknown C
And that's very suspect for a person that calls themselves a historian, because there are even pseudo historians that will at least learn the fucking language. David Irving is a really good example for a lot of European history. At least he learned the language. He could speak German even if he ended up writing a bunch of bullshit.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
When there are historians, pop historians or whatever who've written for decades about a topic, but they can't read any of the source material, I'm like, that's very strange to call yourself a historian and do that. And I'm sure there is through every other thing, through every field, there are going to be some heuristics, but it requires a level of critical thinking. And that. When I say critical thinking, I mean that, you know, the things to kind of look out for because you've developed some of that vocabulary and there's a.
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Unknown A
Wisdom component to it as well. You know, you have to deal with people for a decade or two before you can understand really, you know, well, why did they make this decision? You know, that kind of. You can't. You can't just read it and, and critically think about it. You have to have context. Yeah, exactly.
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Unknown B
That's interesting. I would say. I would mostly agree with that. I think there are certain skills that you can apply pretty broadly to improving things. Like, I think that there are certain skills that you could probably teach in public school. So I guess, like, can critical thinking be taught sort of in that, like, I think there are certain skills you can teach people that will just improve broadly their ability to engage with factual information regardless. Right. So teaching them. Gaylof has this really interesting little test you can do for yourself where you get a bunch of. Say you actually go on our website, you get a bunch of truth statements, and you decide whether it's true or false. But then afterwards you have to say, how confident are You. That you're right or wrong. And it's a really good check of being like, okay, well, if I think I'm right a hundred percent of the time, and I got 50% on this test of, like, true or false statements, my system to alert me of whether or not I should be confident is.
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Unknown B
Is busted, and I need to drop that down. Right. So there are those types of skills that I think you can build into people being like, okay, well, how much do you really know about statistics? Like, should you be confident that, like, X causes Y? Like, do you understand how inferences work? And you can train people to at least think, what do I maybe not know about this topic? Like, I feel like there are some heuristics that you can train that would vastly improve media literacy, et cetera, et cetera.
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Unknown A
You just hit on something that I think is very critical, and that's the ability to know what. What do I not know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So when you're, you know, you're reading a book and you hit a spot and you're like, I don't. I don't get it. Like, you have to know, like, what am I missing here? You know, I need to, like, who was the governor? Like, what? Something like that, Whatever it is, you know, as a teacher, I can give you an assignment, you know, a newspaper article that I know there are two mistakes in it or something, and have you read it, and we can work through examples, and I can even tell you how to figure out that this sentence is wrong. But that's. That's only for this article. In this context, you aren't. That skill isn't necessarily transferable to reading the history of the pilgrims.
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Unknown A
You know, like, this is a newspaper article about what's happening right now, and you can ask Google if this is true. Right. Whereas pilgrim stuff that you ask Google and you're gonna get who knows whose opinion from Reddit, you know, so, yeah.
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Unknown C
I think learning about the fields is really important. There's a lot of. One thing that I'll tell people when we're reading a particular thing is like, sometimes it's good to just, like, take a step back and ask yourself, like, what is this even saying? It is not with, like, charts and graphs. Like, let's take a step back and, like, what is this actually even telling us? Can we speak through that? Because sometimes people will state a fact, and I'll just, like, ask a question about the statement, and then you can realize very quickly, like, the absurdity on its face. Two common ones. One that's come up on stream a lot and then one has it. But one is a common conservative talking point is of like 40,000 plus illegal murderers have snuck across the border or whatever.
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Unknown B
I thought it was 21 million.
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Unknown C
Yeah. And the question I always ask is like these guys snuck across the border and it's like, yeah, it's like border patrol didn't catch them or anything. It's like, no, how do they know they were murderers? And it's just immediately like, oh shit, that doesn't make any sense. Or a common complaint I'll hear is people say like, like, oh, this medication is safe. Let me guess who paid for the study. The company that has the drug. And then you can ask them like, who the fuck else would pay for this study? They're competitors. Yeah, no shit. But what you're supposed to see is if the researchers have the conflicts of interest, it's not like they're bringing their own like in house researchers to come into It's. But of course they're paying for their. Yeah, no shit. What do you mean? Who else would pay for it?
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Unknown C
Yeah, there's like a lot, but I think, yeah, like, yeah, it's been said a lot, but. Oh, and on that thing about like understanding what you're reading, I'll never find this article. And at this point I'm convinced I made it up. I feel like I read a long time ago that adults can learn languages faster than children, but we think that we can't because of like neuroplasticity or whatever. But the author was making the argument that the reason why we can't is because we're so much smarter that we can use context clues to figure things out and not learn the language. And people are very good at intuitively doing context stuff. And you can read something and not know it and kind of, you know, like piece together what it is, but that's not really knowing. And people make fun of me on this on stream sometimes because we could be reading it could be fucking Wikipedia, could be a medical article, whatever.
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Unknown C
But like if I don't know a word, I'll click through it, will read the next article and then if I don't know where there and sometimes I'll be like four or five deep and I'm like, okay, we were on Investopedia trying to learn about the Federal Reserve and now we're reading what's interesting, M1, M2 and M3, money supply. I don't know, we'll just click, keep clicking and reading and then finally you have it All. Okay, now we'll go back and read this. Because if I didn't know, if I had to go six wikis deep just to learn this term, how could I ever expect that I would have figured that out with context clues, Just reading the sentence. Yeah. And then what happens is again, when you don't have that baseline understanding. This is one of my huge criticisms of the video essayists, you guys, is when I listen to a person to a video and it's a 10 minute video, or an hour video, whatever, sometimes I feel like that person knows 10 minutes worth of that topic or an hour's worth of that topic.
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Unknown C
Every single thought they had went into this. Whereas, like, if somebody is speaking who's very knowledgeable to a thing for 10 minutes, there's probably at least, at least 10 hours that they could talk about just that topic, if not more, depending on what it is. Right?
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Unknown A
Yeah, I try and do that with my own videos. In the very beginning, it was very just, here's my video. But now I'm like, I need to be able to answer for every single sentence that's in here. If someone's like, why did you say this? Or where did it come from? I need to be able to say, here's why, here's where it came from. So. And I need to be able to answer questions. So if someone watches my video and they're like, why did this happen? I need to know more than what I put in the video.
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Unknown C
Yes, exactly. Because one thing that people don't realize, and I hate it, so many people criticize Wikipedia and they don't know the good criticisms. And this is the thing that drives me insane. Okay, I don't see Wikipedia warrior. No, actually, no, actually, I. I think you should read a lot of stuff and other people will read Wikipedia more than I do. But when I hear a certain criticism of Wikipedia, I'm like, you don't even know why it's a bad source. Here's the thing that I feel very strongly about. If you are sourcing compilation sources, sometimes people will say like, oh, well, if you're sourcing the wiki, we'll just click through to the things and like, you know, go to that, read that, and then source that. I don't think that's good. If you're reading a Wikipedia and it's sourcing something else, you should just source the Wikipedia because that tells me way more about what happened than if you source the underlying sources.
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Unknown C
Because what people don't realize is the editorial decisions of what you're Even sourcing is arguably more important than whatever the fuck you're writing yourself. And I remember I got into an argument with a guy who gave me like three or four sources. And I was trying to figure out. And it had to do with, like, statements that a US Ambassador from Israel is making. Abba Yvonne, I think. Or Abba Yvonne. It was statements that he was making. And I was trying to figure out, okay, where did you pull this sentence from? Because I don't understand what's wrong. And then he gave me the source, which is one of his diaries about. I think it was before the Six Day warriors gave me one of his diaries. And then I go up and I pull up the book and I download it and I read it on.
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Unknown C
Okay, I don't what's coming before and after this. I don't really think this is like the statement is meaning what you think it means. And he's like, okay, well, I got this source. And after doing this for about an hour, I realize you weren't. You didn't pick any of these. These are the fucking footnotes from somebody else's book. Why didn't you just source me their argument? Because you didn't pick these sources, and that's very frustrating. That's one of the limits of Wikipedia. One of the biggest restraints of Wikipedia is you can't evaluate the importance of. Of a source that comes from A or B. I could read a sentence that says all white people are able to fly, and then the next sentence could say, white people also have laser vision. That first source could be from the most discredited author in all of human history, and the second source could be fucking God himself.
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Unknown C
But I have no way to evaluate the weight of either of those. So. Yeah, but, so the editorial decision, what you're saying, like, why did you include that sentence is arguably more important than whatever fact itself you included. Right, Yeah.
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Unknown A
I disagree with you on Wikipedia, apparently.
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Unknown C
Oh, sure. What do you disagree about? Well, I think it has limitations as a source. I just don't think people understand why. And at this point, the media environment is so fucking degraded. If you read the Wikipedia, you already know more than 99.9% of whoever the fuck is arguing.
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Unknown A
You know, I think Wikipedia is fine if you want, like, general knowledge and just. Just some sort of base understanding.
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Unknown C
Starting point.
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Unknown A
Yeah, a starting point. But, you know, as I'm doing research, you know, I'll look at this person's page and they'll say that they got married to. So. So on this day, like, oh, and I'LL click on so and so they got married with them on some different day. And like, even Wikipedia isn't consistent with itself. And so that part is very frustrating. Yeah, especially, I mean, I was a teacher back in 2012, 2014, 2015. So Wikipedia was, was a thing. Not ChatGPT, thank God. But the amount of times I would, I would get, I would be able to tell exactly which article they copied it from because it's wrong in this specific way. Right, yeah. Now those are kids and they, you know, don't know yet that they shouldn't do that. But a lot of adults still do it. You know, they still, they still, you know, here's the Wikipedia where it says that so and so.
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Unknown A
And like, what's the source? Oh, it's some book that isn't available online, which means the editor found it in some library maybe and put it in there.
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Unknown C
The worst thing is after reading a lot of stuff now, and I hate it because it limits my ability to speak on a lot of topics because I just don't want to talk about a thing if I haven't read it. I think it's really important to go through footnotes and annotations because my God, even really seemingly well renowned or well sourced fucking Supreme Court decisions. And Roberts does this a lot where there'll be a quotation. He did this a lot in the immunity case with Nixon v. Fitzgerald where he'll cite a sentence and what comes after it is incredibly important and is absent, absent from the citation. And it's like, this would radically alter my understanding of the implication of this quote. And on Wikipedia, like you said, a lot of the times it's like, oh, this comes from, you know, from Keller, page 127 through 129. Well, thanks, motherfucker.
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Unknown A
That's the title of this. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown C
Jesus. Yeah. So that's very annoying that you can evaluate the underlying material sometimes when it comes to quotes.
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Unknown A
In my Seventh Day Adventist video, no, my Christian Science video where I'm. There was a book that I was reading because it was highly recommended and I started to notice like the little things, right? And one of them was that in a quote there was a lot of ellipses. There's just a ton of ellipses. And I'm like, I want to know what's missing here.
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Unknown C
You know, it's a book. We're supposed to spend a lot of time reading this. You don't have a 47 minute fucking time limit. Why are you cutting so much out here? Like, like I'm already bored enough to read a history book. Include the goddamn quote. Right, yeah, sorry.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I included that part in the video where I was like, here. And I. So I looked it up and what's missing? The most important thing ever. Like, yeah, it was a. It was a. So Mary Baker Eddy, the leader of Christian Science, the whole origin story is very similar to Scientology in that she was mortally wounded and she healed herself through the magic of prayer. And. And now here's a whole religion. But there was a letter she wrote, like, two weeks after her injury where she. She wrote to a doctor, and in the book where the ellipses were, were all of her saying, like, I'm still deathly injured. I can't move. Please help me. Blah, blah. But this is supposedly after she healed herself. Right? So. So the authority, like, just erase that part to keep a quote.
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Unknown B
Why just paraphrase her at that point?
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Unknown A
Well, because then you read it and you're like, oh, okay, there's quotes. Yeah.
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Unknown C
Oh, heuristic. That's actually a big red flag for me now is I immediately assume somebody is full of shit when they say, I have 350 footnotes, I have 270 annotations. Anytime somebody brags about the number of sources that they have in a book, I'm always like, I don't know about that. Because the two biggest authors I've seen do this are. Irving would brag about this constantly, and Finkelstein brags about this a lot. The source material is not utilized very well in either case. Yeah.
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Unknown B
When I was thinking you were talking about. People don't. Don't like not knowing what you don't know.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown B
I think a lot about when I was thinking about stages of learning. I always. When I'm coming across a new topic, I feel like where I start at is, like, one heuristic I use personally to tell if I should even engage in talking about a topic is if somebody says, what do you not know about X? And I don't have an answer, that means I'm like the baby when it comes to this. If you don't even know what you don't know, that's like a really big, like, warning flag. Is there any other warning flags since you want to be about, like, knowing better to cue you that you should be further advancing or more cautious in your assumptions about the topic.
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Unknown A
Could you ask that again? Yeah, here the question again.
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Unknown B
What are some flags that occur to you of going, I need to look into this more. I need to investigate this more now.
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Unknown A
See, that's also like very situation dependent. Right. Because there are points where I'll read something in a book and I'm like, hold on now. And I'll end up doing an hour of side research to try and figure out what that is. But. But I don't know that I can come up with any, like, specific examples, really.
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Unknown C
One funny thing that happens with books is a similar thing to Wikipedia. Where do you know J.J. mcCullough is?
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Unknown A
Yes, of course we're friends. Oh, okay.
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Unknown C
I'm sorry.
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Unknown A
No, I'm just kidding.
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Unknown C
No, he's a cool guy. I love him. He brought up this. I think he brought this up, or I've heard it before, and I was reminded of it in his video, that Wikipedia ends up being this repository and the source for every single claim on the Internet.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown C
That can happen for some historical stuff as well.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown C
Where you see a certain statement that pops up and you're just like, I know where this came from for Ukraine and Russia. There is this concept that NATO promised not to move one inch eastward. And I know where this claim comes from. And it shows up in every single propaganda meeting. And it's like it was over Baker. And the conversation over with Gorbachev and all this. And it's like. And sometimes, sometimes there are those, like, if you know the underlying material and you see like this one statement, you know where it comes from. But it's funny that that wiki problem happens sometimes in books as well, where it's one source that comes up over and over and over again.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, you, you want to know about, you know, whatever, Hawaii. And you look it up and, and you see in the Google, like, little summary, it's like the same sentence over and over because they've all just been copy pasting from each other, you know? Yeah.
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Unknown B
Which topic that you've done so far has been difficult to research because of this, where like the, the sourcing isn't great or even if you go to the books, you're like, oh boy. Like, we're all, we're all sourcing from the exact same thing. And I don' that's good. Has there been any topic that's been really difficult in that way?
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Unknown A
I mean, Hawaii is turning out a little bit that way. There's one guy named Kukendall who is like the ultimate source on everything. And he's back in the 1920s and 30s. So every book I've read cites him. So I was like, okay, I just need to read him. Then I think Christian Science was probably the most difficult to research because the information just, just isn't out there. Like they're a small group, so there aren't a lot of books about them or anything. So I guess when the more niche a topic is and the fewer books there are, it makes it more difficult. You would think that a lot of these, like Seventh Day Adventists was kind of the same way and that there just aren't a lot of books talking about their, their history either because they don't want that to be, or, or what have you.
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Unknown B
I'm surprised to hear that actually, because I feel like maybe I have a biased perspective because Seventh Day Adventist is really big in like the city that I come from in Alberta. But I'm surprised to hear that there's just not a lot of books on the history of Seventh Day Adventism.
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Unknown A
Yeah, there aren't.
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Unknown C
As you go into a lot of these things, more and more, these like little heuristics actually pop into my mind. It's just kind of funny as you bring these up in terms of. Sometimes people don't realize. Maybe this has to do again, with the fluidity of knowledge in an area. But people sometimes will make claims they don't realize how strong the claim they're making is. Like, there are some stories, stories that on their face are immediately plausible. And there are some stories on their face that are immediately unbelievable. However, people will say the two. Like they're the same historical in a modern example. So like, a historical example might be something along the lines of like or. No, actually these are both the modern examples. A modern example might be something along the lines of somebody will say something like, in Israel, there's two claims, okay?
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Unknown C
In Israel, Palestine, this soldier shot this innocent civilian. And I think it's because they wanted to kill this civilian. And that claim on its face is immediately not. It's not. That's not an unbelievable claim that a soldier could do that action. That's there's bad people, there's a lot of bad blood like that. I, I'm not immediately, like, there's no way, but then somebody will say something like, there was an airstrike that was called on this building. I think they did this just to kill civilians. And when you understand kind of like the whole strike cell process, it's like, like there's a lot of people involved that were signing off on this attack that was literally done just to murder swings. Regardless of whether the claim is true or not, that claim is way more extreme than just the individual soldier. But people Will cite them as though they're equally like, oh, yeah, one could happen than the other could for historical stuff or for conspiracy kind of stuff in the modern day, if somebody were to tell me something like the head of the FBI made a phone call to.
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Unknown C
Or the head of the FBI was trying to get a police department to. To arrest more black people because he wanted to be racist or whatever under Donald Trump, and somebody would have said or doesn't have, you know, Trump, you know, anything somebody said, like, you know, I think this guy called the police chief or whatever. Some claim like that. While that's a pretty fantastic claim, it's like, okay, you're implicating two people here. Not unbelievable on its face, but when somebody will say something like this entire police department or the entire FBI or CIA is all involved in, like, staging attacks against Americans or whatever in the modern day, when everybody has cell phones and these are all like, like that's.
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Unknown A
That'S a way higher. Yeah, right.
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Unknown C
Like the idea that one or two people in the CIA or somebody might have wanted to kill, like a certain person is way different than like a whole bunch of people in the government. Cause 9, 11. These are way different in strength. And yeah, a lot of people don't immediately see the difference there.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I. Oh, no, my brain just flopped. Oh, I remember. I remember. Okay, Okay. A lot of your videos, what I've been finding interesting, especially the, The Kellogg's and the vegan. Not vegan, sorry, the vegetarian video. There's often times, like one or two men that are very central to the story. Right. In the case of vegetarianism, it was Sylvester Graham, I think, was like the, A really important character in all this. Obviously Kellogg.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Is the central character of the Kellogg story. How do you. Because this makes me. I. And I'll be very clear, I'm a bab on this theory. I don't know anything about this theory. I don't know what. I don't know about this theory. But the Great Man Theory constantly comes to mind when I hear these stories about, like, one individual changing everything. I even think about Musk and probably the level of impact that he had on the recent election. Right. Do you. What do you think about the Great Man Theory? Do you think that there's evidence for it? Why do you agree or disagree with it?
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Unknown A
So I, I guess I don't discount the Great Man Theory right off the bat. I do think there are some valid criticisms within it that, like when, you know, Churchill didn't win World War II, you know, he, he didn't do it. It was the country. Right. So in that case, like the great man theory doesn't really hold up for me. But when it comes to like, who pioneered cereal, that can be one person, you know, who, who invented Graham crackers? Like, obviously it's one guy. Well, I shouldn't say obviously, obviously, but, but you know, like, who, who popularized this theory or whatever that that can be one person. I, I don't see why you'd have to complicate that. But when it comes to, you know, large countries and political movements and stuff, that's where I think it gets a little shaky. There are certainly people you could point to, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but then there are also all the people standing next to him whose names I don't know, you know, So I think it's very situation dependent.
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Unknown A
And like I said, when it comes to countries, I tend to discount it. But when it comes to ideas and, and products, yeah, I think one person is capable.
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Unknown B
Why do you think it feels like so, so Sylvester Graham. Could you maybe just for the audience remind us like, who he is, why he's relevant and like, what he did.
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Unknown A
So he lived in the 1820s and 30s? Well, okay, he lived longer than that, but that's where he was 10 years old. But he was very concerned with lascivious thoughts and masturbating. And he thought that a very plain diet would, would stop those urges. Meat and exciting flavors that excites you and makes you want to.
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Unknown C
Why?
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Unknown B
Okay, sorry. Because Kellogg's was also obsessed with masturbation. Why are there so many food people that are obsessed with masturbation?
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Unknown A
They were directly.
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Unknown B
Okay, it's incestuous ideas, essentially.
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Unknown A
I guess I would call Kellogg like a son to Sylvester Graham. They weren't like the same age. They came one after each other. And a little bit of overlap there, but. But yeah, he, Sylvester specifically, like in his diaries, he talks about how embarrassed he is over his masturbation habit and all that. So he came up with this idea and it caught on because that was like a big issue at the time, this beginning of temperance and all that. But then Kellogg came along in like 1870 and he, he took the idea and kind of ran with it. He wasn't as obsessed with the masturbation stuff like we all kind of la Corn Flakes because they were invented to stop you from masturbating, which isn't true. They were invented as a dietary aid to make you poop four times a day. But also he believed that this plain cereal would Also stop you from masturbating.
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Unknown A
Like it.
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Unknown B
So is it because it improved your overall health and masturbation was like a symptom of ill health?
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Unknown A
Yeah, masturbation was a degenerate activity, which, by the way, in that video I learned what degeneracy actually meant. I always thought that it was like just some. Some cultural, like backward, going backwards culturally, I guess, maybe. But really what it is is they thought that as you masturbate, you're letting your life force out so you will physically degenerate, your body will break down and you'll become weak. And yeah, I was like, wow, really? That's where degeneracy comes from. Okay. Actual literal degeneracy.
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Unknown B
Yeah. With Sylvester Grant Sickly himself.
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Unknown A
Yes, yes. Yeah. As a child. Yeah.
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Unknown B
And Kellogg was as.
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Unknown A
Well, I don't know if he was okay. No, I don't think he was because he. I mean, he was a medical doctor and stuff, so he was. I mean, that was his big thing. He had a sanitarium, this hospital that people would go to, and he invented corn flakes to feed the people at his hospital, not as a mass product. So.
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Unknown B
Yeah. So one thing that I find really interesting when you look at these case studies of like, Kellogg or, or Sylvester Graham is they not only revolutionize, for example, the food industry, but they also come with so much additional baggage so that they. They don't just change food. They're like a cultural phenom that affect everything.
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Unknown A
Exactly, yeah. Metamucil Activia, the yogurt, anything that's like fiber to keep you regulated. There is no such thing as regular. You poop when you have to poop. That's just how it is. But Kellogg was like, you have to poop four times a day. So that's the definition of regular. So there's that. The, the acidophilus probiotic stuff he did also.
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Unknown B
Is that connected to, like, modern day probiotics and is that like all part of the same thing?
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. He. He came up with that. To help people with their guts and use it today. Yeah, yeah. My grandma, she was a nurse during World War II and then a grandma. And whenever we'd go to visit her for Christmas, she would always ask, like, when was the last time you had a bm? When. When was the last time you had a bowel movement? Because nurses in the 40s and 50s were still taught Kellogg's ideas. And, you know, those people are still a lot. Well, a lot of them anyway, are still alive. And so those ideas are still Around.
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Unknown C
So wait, is your grandma. She's not alive today.
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Unknown A
She died last year, actually, so.
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Unknown B
Wow.
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Unknown A
How old was she? 93.
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Unknown C
And you're telling me this probiotic shit is bullshit? How many? Four times a day, maybe 93.
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Unknown A
I'm not saying it's bullshit. I'm saying that he started and it came about. What is BS is that you have to poop regularly. What?
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Unknown C
Like, what do you mean by that?
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Unknown A
You just poop when you have to poop.
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Unknown C
What if you poop, like, once a month?
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Unknown A
Then that's what your body decides.
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Unknown B
Very unlikely, though, Right?
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown C
Is there going through modern stuff? Obviously we're on the. The age of misinformation. We've been here for like eight years at least. Yeah. Is there anything that you have taken with you from your studying for YouTube videos that you think helps you parse news today or, like, advice you would give to listeners when it comes to parsing news today, or do you just totally go hands off when it comes to modern politics?
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Unknown A
Oh, no, I'm definitely very involved in hands on. My therapist says I shouldn't be, but I'm like, why. Why are you telling me to be less informed? So anyway, yes, I'm very involved. And I mean. I mean, I'm just gonna say, like, when it comes from the right. I typically distrust it until I find it somewhere else. It. They're prone to exaggeration. They're prone. I mean, they. They'll say stuff like, can you believe this senator is pro pedophilia because he didn't vote for some bill that increased penalty? You know, like. Yeah, and I see that on Twitter all the time. People accusing, you know, of being a. Of being a pedo or being a rapist or whatever. And so I'm. I'm immediately skeptical of. Of most claims like that. And when it comes to. I watch the PBS News hour every day. Just. It's like the one thing I make sure I do because that PBS is the least biased source.
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Unknown A
I would. I would. I would say they don't have ads or anything. And so I. I'll be on Twitter all day. I'll find out that some hospital was bombed, you know, this happened or that happened. And then when the news hour comes on, I'll find out if it was true. And that's sort of how I go about it.
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Unknown C
Do you think we're entering a unique era where some of this stuff might be irrecoverable?
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Unknown A
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Because there are a lot of people who don't watch the news or they just have Fox News on in the background or whatever. I struggle to see a way back, back from where we are now and especially with, with chat, GBT and everything. I'm really concerned that it's going to.
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Unknown B
Get worse even with younger generations. Like, the younger generations will continue to degenerate in the other. In, in the, in the original way it was meant.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, I don't, I can't speak to future generations really, but I'm thinking in the next 10 years, how, how much worse a lot of this will be because a lot of news agencies are letting their people go and using AI to write their stuff now, which, yeah, is not good. I think it's going to just, it's going to sort of get worse until we reach a breaking point and we're like, no, no, more of this nonsense.
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Unknown B
You seem skeptical of AI and like its, its ability to parse information, particularly. What, what's. What's driving that skepticism? What's your concern?
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Unknown A
It. You know, I've, I've used it and tried to. I mean, I've tried to do research. I don't believe anything it tells me, of course, but just, you know, asking it stuff that I know the answers to just to see what it says. And a lot of people will say that it's not used for that, but that's what people do use it for. Sure. That's, you know, you're not supposed to. You're not supposed to put Q tips in your ears either. Right. Like, people are going to do it anyway. So I, I would look at it, ask it questions, I would correct it, and it would be like, yeah, of course, you're right. Sorry. Just. I don't. It's not.
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Unknown C
I was so irritated. It shows up on all my goddamn Google searches. I never trust any of the fucking AI summaries for anything.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, it's. It's very difficult. And it. So, so I worry about the information part. I worry about people using it for research. I also worry about, you know, people not developing their own skills and instead of relying on this instead. Yeah.
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Unknown B
What's interesting, because I'm, I'm pretty actually pro AI personally, but for not what, like, when people use it to, like, ask it a question of fact, I'm very, very concerned. There's definitely better systems. I forget the. There's one AI system that all it does is it, like, pulls from the Internet and it cites sources. It'll give you an answer, an immediate citation, which is handy because then you can at least like, click through his.
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Unknown A
Citation, I think that's Gemini, the Google.
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Unknown B
Yes, that is what it is. But recently I was trying to figure out. I like, had like an interpersonal dispute and I was trying to figure out how to go forward and what to do about it. And I was like, I need to talk to somebody about this. But the only person that I was around was the person I was mad at. And I'm not going to talk to the person I'm mad at about why I'm mad at them. So I was like, I'm just gonna try ChatGPT. Let's see if it, like, has any ideas. And so I, like, kind of outlined the whole situation and it was like, exceptionally helpful at helping me, like, organize all of my thoughts, like all of the different threads about what was going on, so I could kind of like, read back my own thoughts and go like, oh, okay, so like, this is what I think about this and this and this.
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Unknown B
And that was really helpful and I gave it a little bit more information and I asked it as well. But, like, part of what happened is I asked it, for example, I was like, if I'm having, having a, like an error in my thinking pointed out, tell me if there's like, any inconsistencies or any contradictions or if there's an area that I'm being like, blind to, which it actually did really well. Like, at one point was like, do you think that, like, you're feeling this because of, like, this other thing that you mentioned, like four paragraphs up? And I was like, ironically enough, yes, I think I am. I am.
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Unknown C
The whole nice thing about, or the whole hard thing about AI was getting more generalized AIs that could kind of like problem solve. And ironically enough, I think that the harder thing, AI is actually decent at problem solving, but it's just, it's not good at, like, sourcing or understanding underlying material. So if I give it, like, you know, like, for a lot of programmers now who don't always know the syntax of the different frameworks are working in or languages they're coding in or whatever, can ask like, hey, can you show me how I would do this in, you know, some language? ChatGPT could be very good at giving you that answer, or if you tell it a bunch of problems, it'd be good at giving you something. But when you're asking, yeah, for sources or information to teach you, not an educator, it lacks a lot of the.
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Unknown C
Or at least up to this point, it's still lacking a lot of the contextualization and just the knowledge of. Of knowing what is a thing. Another way.
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Unknown A
Heuristic.
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Unknown C
Heuristic. Another way that I can tell sometimes when people are understanding the material they're talking about is when you ask a person like, oh, like, how do you research this? And that answer is going to vary a lot. You know, if somebody does a lot of, you know, like medicine or biology, they'll probably be able to rattle off more than just even like, nature. Lancet of the New England Journal. They might. Lot of journals I've never heard of before. Right. But if nobody has an answer like, oh, I'll usually like. I'll just google around and I'll read a lot of sources. That's always the answer that everybody. I Google and I read a lot of sources.
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Unknown A
I use Wikipedia as a starting point. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown C
And it's like the. If you have a fluidity in some field, you should probably know a couple landmark papers because there's usually a few big ones. You should probably know a couple of the dueling authors because there's usually at least two that are going back and forth right at each other. Or a couple of, like the. Or a few of the big historians. Because in every single field, it won't always be like this. There's never when somebody's like, oh, like, I don't know how I feel about X topic. There's a million papers. No, there's probably not. There's probably several really big ones. There's probably a few really big lit reviews or meta analyses. And this is generally what people are going off of. There's never. Or if there are like a million papers, the effect size difference between these are quite small. Nobody's writing a paper one day that says minimum wage will destroy the economy, and the next day saying minimum wage will be the salvation that takes us to glorious socialist.
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Unknown C
Like, that's not the case. Usually they're arguing on that. On that. The ends of that. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
I mean, there's big, big concern among teachers that they're using it for homework. I. I'm not worried about that right now.
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Unknown B
Really.
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Unknown A
Every assignment I've seen that was AI, I could immediately tag it as AI. Like just the, Just the way it's written. And if you know your students, it's very easy. Like, you didn't write this. Like, there's. You've never used this word before.
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Unknown B
Like, so then. And because I know, I know a bunch of college students. I know both professors and college students. Right. So I love hearing both of the sides. So I know a bunch of College students that are like, if you just use a basic AI, they'll always catch you. But if you train the bot on five of your previous papers and then use this specific button this way, and then you test on this thing, the AI can't be done.
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Unknown A
Keeper.
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Unknown B
At that point, it's actually interesting because there's a part of me that's like. Like, there's a part of me that's open to this. If. It's like, if. If you have to go through that much work to get a bot to, like, write your prose for you, you're almost kind of engaging enough with the ideas that I might just give you past. You might have a different. A different feeling about that.
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Unknown C
I was a huge cheater in high school when I could. And I would go through a retarded amount of effort to cheat. Because I bring up the. For my AP English 3 class, my teacher didn't let us use Spark notes. And the first two, it would be like the daily, like 10 question quizzes to make sure we're reading the two. And I got zeros on both of them. And I thought I kept reading the wrong spark notes. After the third day in class, she's like, I noticed some of you are having a lot of trouble with this. If you're not reading the material, it's because you're not reading the material. And if you're reading the spark notes. Because when I make my quizzes, I design them around the spark notes. And I was like, okay, bitch, well, I'm gonna read the Spark notes and the cliffnotes and the Spark notes and Cliff Notes extended discussion.
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Unknown C
So fuck you. So by the end of this, I've got like four different sites basically where I'm reading this shit. And I think, like, halfway through the year, I'm like, fuck me. I'm just gonna read Beowulf. Jesus.
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Unknown B
Stupid, boring fucking book.
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Unknown C
Yeah. At some point, like, the cheating just becomes so much effort. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
I guess when I think about AI, I wonder how close it is to, like, the advent of the calculator for mathematics teachers, for example, where they're like. Because there was a big pushback against using calculators for good reason. A lot of the reasons that they gave were sound.
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Unknown A
I was actually going to use that example earlier when we were talking. I was going to say that when the calculator came about, they were worried. Worried that now people won't know math because. Because they'll just use the calculator. Right. And you know, when the calculator was invented, everyone at that time knew Math, they knew 4 +4 is 8 and all that stuff. They knew that and they get the calculator and that's just a shortcut. They know how to do it, but this is shorter when it comes to chat GPT they are, they don't know how to do it yet. They're just asking the thing to do it right. So they don't know whether the output is, is makes sense or is correct or anything like that. And so that's why it's very, it's.
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Unknown B
An apples to oranges situation for, for.
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Unknown A
For most of the papers anyway that I've seen. It's immediately obvious that it's, that it's AI and especially if you know what grade level you're working with and stuff, it becomes even more apparent. Are there lazy teachers and college professors who will just read it and, and accept it and that's it? Yeah. And that's probably most of them. Yeah. And that's a bummer. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Do you think college students could get away with it more than like a grade 10 student? Just because a college student you would expect to be writing at a higher level. So When a grade 10 student throws you this AI paper, you're like, bro, you don't know what half these words mean. Like there's no way you wrote this.
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Unknown A
Just, just to clarify here, whether you're a 10th grader or a college student, you're the only person you're cheating is yourself. Like the only person you're, you know, oh, wow, you got the grade great, but now you don't know the stuff. Right. So I was, I was very much that way in high school and even my first time through college, I just wanted the grade at the end. I don't like, I was in gifted in honors classes in high school. So the whole time I had this chip on my shoulder that like, I don't actually need to do this because I already know this stuff. Right. So I, I was a B student in high school and college because I was like, ah, I don't need this or this is beneath me or whatever. And it was my second time through college when I was 30 years old that I was like, I'm going to do everything.
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Unknown A
I'm going to read every assignment, I'm going to go to every study hall, I'm going to join whatever clubs and groups there are and all that. And, and the experience was so much better, not only socially, but like I, I was getting 4.0s every, every semester. And I'm like, college is wasted on 20 year olds.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it's interesting. That's another heuristic I'll often use when people are like, man, I was just so lucky. I think, like, the college that I went to was just really good. I'm like, I know that you were an engaged student because there's no. Every single time I hear this from somebody, and I used to always say the same thing, like, I'm just really lucky at the university that I went to. And I still could, to some degree, feel that way. My mentor was incredible, but also I was an incredibly engaged student. And every other person that I hear say that, typically I'll look up their universities. Like, if you look at my university, like, it's one of the top undergraduate Canadian universities, but it's like, that's not. It's. It's cool. It's not that impressive. Right.
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Unknown A
Sure.
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Unknown B
And you hear that over and over, which I feel like is such a good sign that somebody is engaged. I also wanted to push you on this one. Okay. As a very engaged student, I hate writing papers.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
I loathe it because I. I'm. But this is the issue. And I realize that I'm not necessarily the student that all. All learning is geared for. Necessarily. I remember I wrote a paper on Cap Gross syndrome. Do you know what Cap Go syndrome is?
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Unknown A
I have a video on that one, yeah.
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Unknown B
Oh, really? Do you want to tell us what CAP syndrome is? Just because it's really cool.
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Unknown A
Okay. Well, so it usually happens after some sort of injury or surgery or something like that, or stroke, where a part of your brain loses blood and. And dies. But it's. It. What happens is you look at someone, you know, your dad, your sister, whatever, and you know they're your dad or your sister, and that you're supposed to love them, but you don't feel anything when you look at them because the connection got severed somehow. So you look at them and you feel nothing. So you think they're fake, like this is a replacement person or something.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah. And it's really cool because you can take people, like, they can call their mom while they're looking at their mom voice.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And they'll be like, no, that's my mom, but that's not my mom. And you're like, bro, it's crazy. Right? It's a really interesting brain. Brain condition, essentially, that shows you, like, the. Anyway, if you're a neuroscience nerd, it's just really fascinating. And so I had to write this paper on it. And I remember I did all the Research. I figured it all out. Learned a whole bunch about Capgras syndrome and the centers that were associated in where the severance we believe probably is occurring and all this sort of stuff. And I was like, oh, now I have to put this into prose. Like, I had it all put out. And I was like, I don't want to have to put, like, thes and all that stupid stuff, you know, I remember being so mad. And so when I looked back, I'm like, gosh, if I had, like, an AI system where I could be like, this is all the information you need to know.
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Unknown B
This is my thesis. This is my conclusion. Can you just write it for me? I would have loved that. And I would have still absorbed it. Now, you may disagree, but, like, oh, I hated writing papers for this reason because I'd be like, I just spent like 30 hours researching this. I get it. I've written it all down in bullet form. I know this. You could grill me on it. I could do an oral presentation on this, and I would love to do that, but now you're making me write it, and I hate that. And I hate that I have to do it.
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Unknown A
Sucks. Do it anyway.
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Unknown B
I agree. And I mean, I did. I did. But.
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Unknown A
In life, like you, sometimes you have to write stuff. Sometimes you have to be there on time, and if you're not, you lose it. Like, and. And I. I see that sort of withering away. Even when I was a. When I was a teacher, my school didn't have due dates. I would assign homework and. And I wasn't allowed to do due dates. The only official due date was the end of the quarter, like you.
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Unknown B
Was it a module school?
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Unknown A
Nope. It was regular. Regular high school. But let's. Let's say it was a challenging high school.
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Unknown B
Okay? Yeah.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown A
So no due dates, which just turn your work in, please, like that. And the only due date was the end of the quarter because that's when grades are due. Right. So poor teachers, you guys must have been. Yeah, I would get a huge stack. Yeah, yeah, I would get a huge stack. I put in my grade. And then the next day a kid would come, please, can you take. Please can you take this? I'm like, no, no. Because if I take yours, what about the six people who asked me earlier this morning that I told no to? You know, I'd have to go back and say yes to them. And. And then you'll. You won't learn that due dates matter. Like, you had one due date and you just couldn't do it too Bad sucks. You know, now you don't, now you have a C and you don't get to play volleyball.
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Unknown A
You know, that's, that's just how it is. Like you, there have to be consequences and it, I feel like those are sort of going away. Even when I this, that situation, I told you, the parent called me very angry. I stood firm, called the principal, called the superintendent, went up to the superintendent. I had an email from them saying, like, we support you in this. There is a due date. This is very clear in the handbook, blah, blah. But I now know 10 years on, that the parents are winning more of these battles. And so the kids, I mean, they're not writing the papers and they don't care about due dates or, you know, that kind of stuff. I don't, I don't think it's very good.
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Unknown B
It's also creating this weird imperative where in, in this way you're actually having to maintain a boundary that fundamentally probably parents should be imposing on their children. Right. And so increasingly we're like co opting the school to be teaching these like, societal skills that they need to have. Right. If you have a job, you can't just like be like, sorry, next week, even though it's like, you know, there's this, I don't know if you've ever read Chris Foss, but he talks about like, in negotiation, treat deadlines like they're negotiable.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown B
And I think that that's a really good negotiation skill specifically. Right. Because you're more likely to land a business deal if you're flexible about them canceling on you and stuff like that.
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Unknown C
Negotiations, though, assume that both sides have leverage. You don't have leverage on your boss.
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Unknown B
Exactly. Right. But the issue is that I think a lot of people will take that advice from like Chris Foss, because I hear people say it a lot and be like, so like, why does my boss care about like the due date of this? My. Probably because your boss has a due date from his boss and his boss has a due date. Due date probably to stockholders or like to something else.
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Unknown A
And the ship leaves tomorrow.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah. And it has to happen. Right. And it's, it's an interesting thing that's happened where people are increasingly frustrated with schools being parentified and increasingly shifting parentification onto schools.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Regardless, very bizarre dichotomy there. Yeah.
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Unknown B
How long did you teach for?
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Unknown A
I was only a teacher for four and a half years. Yeah.
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Unknown B
And then did you start YouTube in that process or what?
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Unknown A
No, no, no, I started YouTube after, so I, you know, I went to college, I got deploy deployed to Iraq. I came back and I was a teacher for four or five years. Then I decided to use my GI Bill and I got my second degree in psychology and I was applying for grad schools and stuff. And my teacher, my professor, my mentor professor told me I should start a blog to keep my skills sharp. And I was like, nobody reads blogs anymore.
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Unknown B
That's a crazy professor. That's interesting. I don't think I've ever heard that.
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Unknown A
So I started the YouTube channel and that's how it happened.
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Unknown B
Cool. Wow. Well, your professor.
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Unknown C
Yeah, they're talking about what are fun facts you've learned.
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Unknown A
Fun facts.
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Unknown C
Yeah, that was the first. I gave you that two parter. The big historical things you think people are misunderstanding now that are impacting us. But what are like, we brought up the night. The heavy night armor is one small box. Oh, you brought up one. Actually, that's not true. Q tips will not destroy your ear brain unless you're like really digging in there. But that's one where people like, you can't use Q tips in your ear canal. That'll. And it's like you have to go really far and actually cause damage.
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Unknown A
You have to like fall over. But they tell you not to do it. I mean, yeah, like we were saying earlier with the, the smallpox blankets. Sorry for the audience.
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Unknown B
Yeah, the audience.
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Unknown A
You know, I was, I was talking about how I'm researching Hawaii right now and I previously did a video on Native Americans and a lot of people will take the stuff they know about Native Americans and apply it to, to the Native Hawaiians. I already told, I already said that they abolished their own religion. So it wasn't like missionaries forcing them or anything. But one of the sort of Native American myths is the smallpox blankets. And there are one or two recorded instances of people trying to use smallpox blankets to get rid of the Indians. However, smallpox doesn't survive outside of the body for very long. So it's unlikely that smallpox blankets actually worked. But they did try.
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Unknown B
Was it rampant trying? Because you said there's one or two accounts. Does it sound like from.
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Unknown A
I'm willing to bet there were more examples that just weren't recorded. Yeah, yeah. But the fact remains that it's. It's also very unlikely to actually work.
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Unknown B
So do you think there was a widespread within the colonies of like, we want to sell these smallpox blankets to try to spread.
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Unknown A
Selling. They were giving them away.
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Unknown B
Giving them away. Sorry. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown C
It was a policy or widespread thing. I Think it'd be more documented evidence of it. Right, right.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
It was just some nefarious actors, and probably they talked about it.
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Unknown A
It was usually like, we need to get rid of this camp or, you know, get them out of this fort and that kind of stuff. Yeah. Okay.
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Unknown B
Gotcha. Gotcha.
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Unknown C
Okay, well, that wasn't a very fun fact. That was kind of dark. Something funner.
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Unknown A
She's a fun fact.
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Unknown B
History is dark. I feel like a lot of history dark.
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Unknown A
This is such, like, a weird, like, putting me on the spot question. It's like, oh, say something in French.
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Unknown B
Yeah. This is literally like when somebody says, I'm a comedian and we go tell a joke. Yeah, tell a joke right now. Make me laugh.
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Unknown A
A fun fact.
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Unknown B
Okay, well, what's your favorite era of history to look at?
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Unknown A
Favorite era of his. My favorite era, I think, is probably the 1800s, globally.
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Unknown B
Is there specific countries that you're most interested in?
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Unknown A
I mean, I'm. I know most about America. Right. So, yeah, it's definitely the 1800s. Probably even, like, the late post civil war 1800s is, like, my favorite because that's when Thanksgiving became a holiday, Christmas became a holiday. That. There's your fun fact for you. I mean, I guess if you didn't know that, that the Pilgrims made Christmas illegal. It was an evil Catholic tradition that they didn't want. So it wasn't a holiday in America until 1881 or something, when the Irish and Catholics were coming.
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Unknown C
Okay. Oh, American fun fact. I think Paul Revere, when he was writing, probably didn't say the British are coming.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown C
Because the colonists would have seen themselves as British, basically.
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Unknown A
Okay, well, I didn't think of that aspect of it, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. Paul Revere.
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Unknown B
That's not true.
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Unknown A
Maybe he did write Paul Revere was one of, like, three or four writers, but he's famous because of the poem. That's.
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Unknown B
Did he write the poem? I don't know.
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Unknown A
Someone else wrote the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Okay. I wonder why they picked him.
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Unknown A
I rhymed, I think, probably.
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Unknown B
Okay, 1800s, America. Trying to think. Ooh, do you read fiction much at all? Do you read 1800 basic.
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Unknown A
Definitely not that, no.
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Unknown B
Okay, that's too bad.
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Unknown A
I generally try to stay away from historical fiction just because I don't want to, like, accidentally have some idea put in my head. That's also in my research period. I don't watch anybody else's YouTube videos on that topic because I don't. I don't want to accidentally borrow their phrasing and I don't want to accidentally pick up a lie or, you know, something they got wrong. So I typically don't watch their stuff. So after the fact, when a video goes up and people are like, oh, did you see Illuminati's video on this? I'm like, no. Specifically, I don't look at anybody else's.
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Unknown C
Especially because sometimes these. There's like, a lot of incestuous videos made about. Yeah, I think the worst. What do you think is the worst community online for this? Did anything immediately come to mind or. I think it's the. I love them and it's entertaining content, but I think the true crime community. Oh, I feel like there's like seven cases that every single true crime everybody's talked about, like, Jodi, Aris and the fucking. There's like five or six different, like, killers that, like, every single person has made, like, a video on, like, running their trial and stuff.
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Unknown A
So.
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Unknown C
Yeah, and I'm sure for history. Yeah, there's a lot of, like, oh, we're. Everybody's going to make a video on this thing. And it's. Did we.
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Unknown A
Did.
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Unknown C
Did the USA know that Japan was going to surrender before World War II and, like, all of these things. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, when I try and think of what the big ones are, it's always like the Civil Rights act, you know, what happened there? And it's not black flight. What is it called when all the black people left the south and moved to, like, Milwaukee and Chicago and the Underground Railroad?
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Unknown C
I'm just gonna.
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Unknown A
It's just something like the Great Migration. I think it's the Great Migration. Okay. But like, every history YouTuber kind of talks about it is those. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Yes, you win.
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Unknown A
Yeah. There's definitely some things that every YouTuber touches on, and a lot of them will do it independently, though, so it's not necessarily incestuous where they watch someone else's and they just regurgitate. Yeah. So at least in the history community, I don't think too many people are cutthroat like that, or they would steal someone else's kind of idea.
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Unknown C
Has there ever been a. Has there ever been a learning of a certain historical thing that recontextualized the event a lot, where you're like, ah, I never would have considered looking at something like that. One thing that I never really considered is I thought that In World War II, in my mind, the US and Japan were fighting and, like, people were dying and maybe we were, like, shooting bombs at each other. And then, like, the nukes Came it was like, whoa. And I'd never really contextual. Contextualized the island hopping. Well, I never contextualized the nukes in the context of. All the Japanese cities got bombed, like, an insanely fucking huge amount. And then like, the firebombing of Tokyo killed more individual than either.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Both the bombs put together, actually.
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Unknown C
Yeah, yeah. And so the idea that. The idea that when the nuclear bombs dropped, like that was definitely horrifying. But po. Like, retrospectively, the nuclear bombs are more horrifying than they probably even were at the time, because at the time, there were entire cities that were being firebombed and destroyed and, like, burned to the ground within a day. Yeah. So that would be like an example, I guess.
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Unknown A
Here's a fun fact for you.
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Unknown C
Is this going to be really dark again?
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Unknown A
Yeah, maybe.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it's history. Of course it's going to be dark.
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Unknown A
Before we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we dropped pamphlets. Yeah. Pamphlets telling them, we're going to drop a bomb on you leave. And. And they didn't believe it because of course, like, a bomb. Sure, whatever. You know. And like you said, Tokyo has been. Was burnt to the ground. Like, cities were just being burnt to the ground kind of all over. Which I guess is. It kind of annoys me when people point to the atomic bombs as these uniquely horrible things when they were just like one of hundreds of cities, you know, Were they bad? Yes. Were they. They uniquely more terrible than Tokyo? I don't think so. No.
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Unknown C
I was gonna say that expression, carpet bombing. People will use it today. Carpet bombing. I was like this.
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Unknown A
You have no idea what carbon bombing.
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Unknown C
You should see, like, the videos of the old planes.
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Unknown A
Like. Yeah. They just open the back and let everything fall out.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown C
Yeah. It's insane. Yeah.
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Unknown B
What do you feel like if you are trying to understand the current. Ooh, okay. I'm gonna give you the worst question ever. Okay. You're gonna hate.
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Unknown A
Yeah, let's go.
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Unknown B
You want to understand the current political climate. What do you think is one of the most important historical events or eras to understand. To help you understand what's going on right now?
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Unknown A
Yeah. Nixon and Reagan, I think, are the most important.
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Unknown B
You had that quick.
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Unknown A
Yeah. As soon as you said it.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Why?
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Unknown A
Because that set the stage for everything that we're seeing now. And Donald Trump takes a lot of his cues from. From that. I mean, he calls Mar A Lago the Southern White House. Nixon also had a Southern White House. Like, he was one. It was very controversial when he did, too, because it's weird. So for Trump to also do the same thing is bizarre. You know, Trump is also a celebrity like Reagan was. There's just a lot of parallels.
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Unknown B
Charisma, like Reagan.
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Unknown A
I mean, sure, yeah, I don't. I don't find him particularly charismatic, but.
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Unknown B
When I say charismatic, I mean there's a certain influential, There's a certain performative gravitas to have, like your ear just shot and you think the cameras and you put your fist in the air. Like, that's a very unique type of.
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Unknown C
I will qualify that story. It was like a minute and a half before he got up. It was after the Secret Service cleared everything. This story gets told in the most irritating way and everybody does it.
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Unknown A
It does look like it happened immediately.
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Unknown C
No, it's because you've seen edited clips of this. I hate when people talk. So the idea is the shot comes down the ground and then he gets. Somebody's like, that's not what happened. The bullet whizzes by, he goes down. The Secret Service comes up and there's about a minute of them, like, shoot her down. All clear. All good. Trump is. They all start to stand up and she's like, give me my. Give me my shoes.
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Unknown A
Give me my shoes.
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Unknown C
Give me my shoes. Give me your shoes. And after about like 500 seconds, he had a shoes. He's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then he does this thing. I think the performativity of that is much less like in the heat of.
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Unknown A
I search everybody edited version out there.
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Unknown C
Yes. If you YouTube, like Trump assassination attempt and watch the full, like two and a half minutes a video, it significantly changes. Now, not to say whether you thought it was cool it did or not. There's like, the story. I hate it because I know in 20 years there's going to be so much that is retold. Yeah. That he jumped up in 10 or 15 seconds. And also I will fight on because people say, oh, well, Trump is charismatic like Reagan. Everybody to some extent liked Reagan. This was a person whose popularity transcended party a lot. Donald Trump's popularity in this country has never surpassed, like, 47 points. He is charismatic with Republican Republicans. Everybody in the left hates him. Obama was a charismatic president because there were a decent number of conservatives. Even if there were the talk rated guys and decent mixers, like, oh, yeah, okay, fine, Obama.
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Unknown C
Trump has never crossed and will never cross unless they manage to deport enough people or kill enough people in the US to make it that way. Will never cross that 50% threshold. In terms of popularity, he's not charismatic. He's a fucking loser. Sorry.
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Unknown B
I somewhat disagree. Obviously, I hear what you're saying.
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Unknown A
I agree that he's very persuasive and influential.
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Unknown B
He's very good at knowing his base. But, yeah, I didn't know that Reagan had a much higher popularity.
-
Unknown C
So Reagan won that he had four states. Yeah. They talk about an electoral college landslide. Reagan I fucking annihilated. It was. What was the one holdout, Minnesota or.
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Unknown A
Minnesota.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown B
It was Reagan doing that made both sides love him so much.
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Unknown A
Well, okay. It's a. It's a reaction to the whole situation. So Nixon, you know, was forced to resign over Watergate and all that, and. And Ford took over, but the Republicans lost the next election because obviously they just had this corrupt president. So they put in Jimmy Carter, and he's pretty universally seen as a weakling. Now.
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Unknown C
My mom and other Cubans I've heard refer to him as turn the other chick. Carter is really.
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Unknown B
I feel like everything I hear about him as a Canadian is that he's like this beloved humanitarian.
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Unknown A
His post presidency is amazing. It's the best post presidency of anybody.
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Unknown C
Carter is probably the reason. And there are a lot of Israeli diplomats. He's probably the reason why Israel was able to negotiate peace with Egypt. He facilitated a lot of that.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Which, you know, when they protested his wife's funeral, he's like, why? Like, of all the people to protest, why would you protest? Like, the nicest. Anyway.
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Unknown C
Can I ask a question about. So from Carter to Reagan, when. Carter. Reagan, Right.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown C
Do you think that there was an event. Okay. The Iranian hostage crisis? Do you think there was anything. Do you think there's anything bad there? There's an accusation that, okay, Reagan came into office, and the second that he came into office, all of the hostages were released. Now, my mom tells us stories like they knew that Carter was a weak man who wouldn't do anything. But when the Republican came in. When Reagan came in, I hate that. Yeah.
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Unknown B
American military power was not existent under Carter. And then when Reagan was there, suddenly the military got really effective again.
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Unknown A
Reagan was working with the Iranians and told them to keep.
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Unknown C
What level of conviction do you feel, like, really strongly about this? I haven't dug into this. All sorts of things.
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Unknown A
I would say 85%.
-
Unknown C
Okay.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Like he was colluding with Iranians for his own political gain. To say, when I get office.
-
Unknown A
Yes, very much like what Trump does now with the, you know, with.
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Unknown C
Oh, with everybody foreign now pledged to me now.
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Unknown A
And Then once I become president. Yeah, that kind of stuff. Stuff, yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown C
We just don't. The Logan Act. Is that just like a meme, I guess, or do we never care about that or.
-
Unknown A
The Logan Act.
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Unknown C
Logan act was. It's supposed to say that if you're. You can't have improper contact, right?
-
Unknown A
Yes, that's right. If you're not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown C
I'm wondering what.
-
Unknown A
What the deal is with that, too. Like, if you're not an elected official, you can't be speaking on behalf of the government, and yet Trump does it all the time.
-
Unknown C
But I think we just stopped for Trump. We just stopped caring about laws.
-
Unknown B
Was the Logan Act. Did it exist when Reagan made that deal?
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Unknown A
I think it's been around for a long time.
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Unknown C
Well, back then. It's different, though, because back then knew they were committing crimes like Iran Contra. These were, like, things that they tried to cover up. Trump doesn't try to cover up any of the crime. It just doesn't. In the open and nobody gives a. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Like Watergate.
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Unknown C
There was like. Like, was it Black Friday where Nixon was gonna fire. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, he was gonna fire, like, half the DOJ or something.
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Unknown A
It was like Bloody Sunday.
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Unknown C
Maybe it was Bloody Sunday where he started.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Like.
-
Unknown C
Yeah, they, like, back then when you committed crimes, you knew they were crimes, you tried to cover them up, but.
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Unknown A
Now there's mass firings and everything. Yeah. And it's.
-
Unknown C
It's. It's basically it. It is. It's the old adage of the, like, if you, like, are dressed nicely, it's like a white dude and just kind of, like, walk anywhere, and you just, like, look like you have purpose. You, like, go anywhere. No one's gonna, like, stop you. That's basically Trump just like, I just committed a crime. I said, I can do that.
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Unknown A
Fuck.
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Unknown C
Do you ever watch Dave Chappelle?
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown C
Do you remember the story that he tells where he's with his friend Chip, who's high, and he's driving and he gets fine?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I didn't know I could do that. Yeah.
-
Unknown C
Yeah, I didn't know I couldn't do that. And Dave's like, I didn't know that would work. And then Chip looks up, he's like, I did know that I couldn't do that. Sorry.
-
Unknown B
Going back, we didn't finish answering the question. Why was Reagan so popular across party lines?
-
Unknown A
I mean, why was he popular? Because he was a movie actor.
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Unknown B
Us charismatic.
-
Unknown A
Never happened before where an actor wanted to be A president. Yeah. And he was very charismatic. And yes, people viewed. Yeah. Carter as a weakling. So when it came time for the next president, Reagan destroyed him. It wasn't even a challenge.
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Unknown B
Really handsome as well.
-
Unknown A
Reagan. I mean, I guess people say so. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Okay.
-
Unknown C
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And also that wasn't the first time he ran for office. He had been running for president. He ran against Nixon even in a primary. So he had been trying for a while. He was a known figure at that point. So. And he was the governor of California. Like people knew who he was.
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Unknown B
Okay, so he had more established.
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Unknown A
But there's a book, Nixon Land that kind of covers this. And the guy who wrote Nixon Land wrote a trilogy of Nixon, Reagan and the in between. And I think those are very good books. Or also when the Clock Broke, that's a newer one that came out that talks about actually the 80s to 90s transition of the neocons and such. And I feel like that's important to understand especially for, for the Zoomers and the, and the gen Alphas.
-
Unknown B
What needs to be understood about that?
-
Unknown C
How much we should miss them.
-
Unknown A
I missed the neocons, like how the situation we're currently in was being set up. You mentioned earlier, I think it was you, that now that you're older, you're. You're starting to hear stories of younger people telling like what happened, happened. Like I, I have, I watched a Zoomer video about the Iraq war. Oh, Jesus. And I was like, I was like, I was alive for this.
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Unknown C
My version of this was watching a tick tock of a girl saying 20 years ago people could work minimum wage jobs and afford two bedroom apartments. I was like, wait, hold on. I'm 35. I work for five, 15 an hour McDonald's. That's.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
In Omaha, Nebraska. I couldn't afford an apartment on my own. I always settle. Right.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown C
Digging back through, I say historical reason, history. I have become so upset in reading about like the, the Ken Starr investigation for Bill Clinton, the Gore. The travesty of the Gore election essentially being stolen. Yeah, yeah. There was this weird, there was this weird thing that happened where in 2020 to like 2022. I kind of was like over the Trump hate. And I'm like, I feel like the liberal have kind of like gotten out of pocket with the whole Russiagate stuff. They've exaggerated a lot. Like, I don't know, like at first I thought it was really bad. I was like, I don't think it is. And then now as I've kind of like gone back through and it's like, okay, what was all this shit? It's like, wait, Bannon's indictment said what? Or you know, Roger Stone was working with the Guccifer guy and he got totally pardoned by Trump.
-
Unknown C
Like, and then I go back and I look like, wait, this stuff was so much worse than even at the time I thought it was. Even when I thought like they were over exaggerating and yeah. Digging through. Republicans are just bad hombres. Not the best. Over the past several decades. Jesus Christ.
-
Unknown A
Not good. I, I read a book about, about the beginning of the Iraq war because I was curious. I was there. Right. So I want to know and, and hearing the back and forth between like the U.S. state Department and Saddam Hussein and everything, it's like this invasion was, was inevitable.
-
Unknown C
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
As much as we sit here and we're like, oh, we went under false pretenses.
-
Unknown C
Like, wait, because of the refusal to adhere to.
-
Unknown A
Yes. The inspectors and all that. Adhere to what, Sorry, the weapons inspectors. So Saddam Hussein 100 verified used chemical weapons on his own people. So he had them. Right. And at some point during the 90s, he secretly got rid of. Of them. This actually happened. He did secretly get rid of them, but the camp. Yes, but he wanted people to still think he had them for, for the deterrent. So he kept playing that he has them and he wouldn't let inspectors come in because they would say that he doesn't have them. Yeah. So he kept playing this game of chicken until he lost. And that's what happened.
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Unknown B
So then how that's. That leads me to a really interesting question. You were there. You've also researched it now. And we talk about it a fair bit. How a lot of people look back at Iraq with high levels of regret. Right. How do you view Iraq then post however many years it's been since you've been there.
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Unknown A
So I went in 2009. So at that point we had been pretty established and I felt at that point that we had already overstayed our welcome. I. Yes, the America went to war under false pretenses with and Colin Powell 100% lied. If I were given the choice at the time, I would have preferred to go to Afghanistan than Iraq. I believed in Afghanistan more than I did Iraq, even at the time. But that's where they sent me. You don't get to choose. Right. And while I was over there, that's when everything started to break down for me. All high school, college, everything. I, I was totally a patriot. America all the way. I had an American Flag over my dorm room bed, you know, like, I was all in. But it was while I was over there that I started to notice just. Just little things like how the truck driver I'm protecting gets paid three times more than I do.
-
Unknown A
And I'm the. The base that I'm guarding is a Halliburton fuel stop. And just stuff like that where I was like, what am I doing here? I feel like I'm just cheap security for Halliburton. And I just sort of. I'm there. I can't do anything about it. So I just sort of just went through the rest of it. Right. And then years later, I learned about this guy named Smedley Butler. I made a video about him also, just because I was like this.
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Unknown B
Yeah, his first name, Smedley. That is rough. Yeah, that's a rough first.
-
Unknown A
1800. Right. But he. He's this Marine general who was in the Spanish American war, World War I, a ton of wars that you've never heard of in, like, Guatemala. I've heard of World War I.
-
Unknown C
That's good.
-
Unknown A
But he's just in all of these wars. And at the end of it, he started speaking out against the military industrial complex. He wrote a book called War is a Racket where he says that he was just a gangster for capitalism. And when I read that, I was like, oh, my. My God. Like, this guy gets it. He's saying. He put into words what I was already feeling.
-
Unknown B
That's me.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown C
I hate the Iraq war. Hot take. I know. I feel like the United States can engage in noble military action overseas. And I think that there are examples of that. And I think that the Iraq war poisoned us, like, our brain and our appetite for any type of foreign whatsoever. And I. Yeah, I look at them modern. Like, if there was ever a time where the full brunt of America's military production could be brought. I don't care if Halliburton or Raytheon or Bowen or whoever, the make money of it. But if it could have been brought to bear for Ukraine, I think that would have been like such an. But because we're so. I call it Iraq pill. Like everybody's politics today, all foreign policy that people argue about. The U.S. always goes back to Iraq in, like, three sentences.
-
Unknown B
Okay, question though, with how big of the up it was? Should there. Is that caution and that, like, guilt essential, essentially warranted. And a good. And a good counteraction to essentially what enabled all of the Iraq war to occur in the first place. Do you get what I'm asking.
-
Unknown C
Yeah. And the answer is no. Because I think the problem is that I have the same problem with blm, the same problem with this Luigi shooting. The same problem with Occupy Wall street is people will be angry, but they don't sit back and figure out, like, well, what is. What was the problem? And so we don't actually. Actually solve the problem. We just think that all of, like, America bad. Like, in my opinion, and you're probably more well read on this, but in my opinion, like, some of the bad things for the Iraq war, you said earlier, if the truth is on your side, why would you tell a lie? Right. Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy. I can understand. I think we didn't kick him out after 91. The Soviet Union just fell. Probably looked bad. If we're, like, doing regime change right after the fun, I was like, okay, fine, sure, he stays.
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Unknown C
Saddam Hussein was not a good person.
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Unknown A
He should have been taken out. Yeah.
-
Unknown C
The invasion of Kuwait was horrible. Gassing the Kurdish people was fucking horrible. It's just a horrib. Horrible regime. At every the. I'm sure you've seen the video of him when he becomes. I don't know if it's when he becomes president and he starts, like, calling out names and having people taken away and. And the people in the. I don't know if it's the parliament or whatever the political body, like, start standing up and they're like, long live Saddam Hussein. And they're all, like, screaming because they know that.
-
Unknown A
No.
-
Unknown C
Yeah. It's just. This is an insane person. But then why. Why, like, why this Office of Special Plans? Why the lying about the.
-
Unknown A
Exactly.
-
Unknown C
Yeah. Weapons of mass destruction. Let's just say they're not negotiating. They're not coordinating with investigators. Like, be honest about it.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown C
And that is a big problem. The lying, obviously. And the second issue, I think is I think everybody says, mission creep. What the fuck is our job? What are we doing? Because it can't be undefined.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown C
Like, you have to have, like, a clear mission. Like, what are we trying to do? And once we've done it, let's leave. Instead of this being this, like, decades and decades of.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's our generation's Vietnam, really, in that is just this endless war with.
-
Unknown C
No clear end or even a clear enemy. Which is another frustrating thing about the Middle East. Especially when people talk about Syria, people will say something like, oh, these guys are the bad guys because Al Qaeda's with them. And it's like, bro, there's, like, 25 different groups at any point in time on either side of this conflict.
-
Unknown A
Like.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
So.
-
Unknown C
But like, Ukraine is like, this is a defensive war against an invading enemy. It's obvious what the territorial integrity should be. We know the borders. We know the leaders. This is a very simple. This is not hard. This isn't Iraq. This is a very simple, simple thing. So it's frustrating.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. But it's because of Iraq and Vietnam and to a certain extent, Afghanistan that we are. That we're timid to do any of that stuff. Yeah.
-
Unknown C
Do you have any. Anything else we should cover? Any important points?
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Unknown B
Checking the time, I guess. Two questions for you.
-
Unknown A
Sure.
-
Unknown B
Number one, what is like a book or an idea that you've read or come across in the last year that has been like a paradigm shift for you where it's really changed how you thought about life, yourself, others.
-
Unknown A
One book.
-
Unknown B
One book or an idea?
-
Unknown A
Or an idea. Okay. I guess. I guess the religion videos. The more I learn about the religions that we typically refer to as culture cults, like Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists, even the more I learn about those, the less able I am to sympathize with religious people today.
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Unknown B
Interesting.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. It is a big paradigm shift in learning how these religions were set up, you know, year by year. Like, they used to believe this, then they changed it to this because some law was passed, but once it was repealed, they changed it back. Like, okay, was that really a convicted belief that you had? Like, stuff like that, Seeing the evolution of it, seeing the. The way the religion talks about itself now, where they ignore the past and that kind of stuff, I'm like, if I know that this happened for the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, it had to have happened for Christianity and Judaism and the others. And so it has really shaken a lot of my, you know, things I thought I knew in that. How can I say that this person is clearly lying and is and is afraid, fraud.
-
Unknown A
But this one 2,000 years ago, where I don't have. What happened every day is. Is perhaps more reliable. And that's. I mean, it's shifted how I interact with people sometimes when. Yeah, just. It just sort of in general, I feel like we are in right now another great awakening. And a lot of these sort of groups that are forming are following a very similar pattern. QAnon is almost. It follows the other cult. The cults that I've made videos on, very, very like, step by step is.
-
Unknown B
QAnon religious as well. Like a Christian religion thing?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a doomsday cult. Right. Really. In that they think Trump was appointed by God to come and clear away. You know, the, the, the.
-
Unknown B
They're probably very re. Revelations believers.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown B
Okay.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. They would decode QAnon's posts in the same way that people nowadays decode the Bible to try and figure out when the end is going to happen, you know, and so seeing these parallels, I'm like, this had to have happened previously and, and will continue to happen. As much as I, I wish, you know, we've reached the end of history or, or that history repeats and will somehow come back to some normal. I don't think so. I think it's going to keep going in the way it is and, and there will still be new religious movements coming about. When the Seventh Day Adventists started in the aftermath of the great disappointment, there were only 20 of them. So think of a church right now that only has 20 people. And imagine 100 years from now that it could have millions. Millions. You probably don't even know the name of that church yet because it's just some small Idaho thing.
-
Unknown A
And so that really has changed my, my historical perspective and how I deal with people, but my historical perspective on the future, like, seeing, this is how it happened, this is what's happening. So this is what's probably going to happen. Happen. Right? That was a big one. And then the, The. The racial stuff is also another big one.
-
Unknown C
The what stuff?
-
Unknown A
The. The racial stuff. I obviously said the racial stuff.
-
Unknown C
The racial stuff.
-
Unknown B
Neo slavery.
-
Unknown A
The racial stuff. Yeah. I mean, dang it. I had something in my head before you said that, and now it's gone.
-
Unknown C
Okay.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, Yeah. I wasn't digging for racial stuff. I wasn't digging for. For proof that America is a racist country or anything, but I wanted to make a video on the post office. And while learning about the post office, I learned that black people weren't allowed to carry the mail because if they had control of communications, they would overthrow America and we'd be under a black republic. Or I'm learning about banking, and that's when I learned about red line mining and how credit scores work and how a white person with this much income gets this credit score and a black person with the same income gets this credit score. And I'm like, there's no other conclusion you could come to other than that it's a race erase thing when it comes to the post office banking. I made a Whole bunch of videos that summer that were all like, I didn't think this was going to be racist, but here it is anyway.
-
Unknown A
And so while I. While I don't think America is a racist country in that sense, it's definitely full of a lot of racists. And we definitely had a lot of racist policies in the past, overt racist policies in the past. Whereas nowadays it's more covert, if anything. Yeah.
-
Unknown C
Well, L for racism. L for racism is in the chat.
-
Unknown B
Thanks for wrapping that up really succinctly. That's a good tldr.
-
Unknown A
Thank you.
-
Unknown B
Racism. L. Not good. Where can people find you? What should they be looking out for? It sounds like you got a new video coming.
-
Unknown A
Well, my channel is knowing better on YouTube. I'm currently working on a video on Hawaii that's going to be a somewhat spiritual successor to neo slavery and Indian removal. I've been working on that for a few months. Months now. I'm hoping that'll come out in March. We'll see. And I'm on. I'm on Twitter, even though I wish I wasn't so much anymore. I'm also on Blue sky and Mastodon, Instagram, all that. But for the most part, I'm on YouTube and I'm on Twitch. I. I'll stream on Twitch Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays. So.
-
Unknown C
Oh, cool.
-
Unknown A
What do you say? Well, nowadays it's me doing my work, so you can actually see me doing the research or see me writing. See me filming, even. So, yeah, that's really cool.
-
Unknown B
Smart.
-
Unknown A
Cool.
-
Unknown C
Thanks a lot for joining us.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, thanks for having me.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for making your videos. Like I said, I'm not. I'm not blowing smoke or anything. Like, I. I genuinely started watching your videos and I was like, I should just invite this person. I've been doing this arc where I'm like, wait, I should just invite people that I organically watch their content and really like. So, yeah, thank you just for the work that you do. I really. It's actually interesting. I'm a decent. Like, I'm. People would know who watch the show. I'm actually a religious person and I love all of your religion videos a lot. And I don't know if there's a religious video you can make that I wouldn't be like, yes, true. But yeah, I love them.
-
Unknown A
Just. I should clarify. My goal is not to take away anyone's faith or dissuade anybody from being right. Oh, okay. Well, then there's that. After I made the Jehovah's Witness video, actually A bunch of Jehovah's Witnesses came to me to tell me that their video or my video woke them up. And I wasn't as proud of that as you would think. I was like, oh, I don't want that responsibility. I don't want to be the guy who convinced you that God doesn't exist. You know, that's not what I want. Yeah. But, you know, it happens, I guess, and it's somewhat unavoidable. And I was also told that they probably were already on their way out anyway, anyway, so there's a little bit of solace there. But my goal is not like, I'm gonna trash this religion and. And destroy it or whatever. Yeah. It's. I want to know about it.
-
Unknown A
You know, I had friends who were Jehovah's Witnesses growing up. They never told me what they believed. So now I know. You know, that kind of stuff.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. I'm really curious to see if you'll ever do. I think evangelical Protestantism. It's huge, and it's so politically relevant. And do you know much about the set of a. Set of a cant. Is it set of a cantivists? No, it's a Catholic. Okay.
-
Unknown C
You'd find one shot Kill Harry Potter. Spell it is.
-
Unknown B
It is. Careful how you say it. Truly. Like somebody across the globe probably just died. It's a sect of Catholicism that has rejected the current Pope. And I think depending on the. The view, almost the last ten sitting Popes.
-
Unknown A
Okay.
-
Unknown B
They're. And they're very politically involved. Involved particularly in like, kind of the alt right political domain. The. I got really, like, obsessed with them when I was looking into life starts at conception. Bills that were kind of popping up all over the States. Like, really? Or I'm like, this is a crazy bill. And all of them were being spearheaded dominantly by either like, kind of Christian nationalists, but a lot of them were sort of a Cantavists. It's a very interesting little sect. I'd be so curious. Curious the video that you make on them if you did.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, I. Okay. So, like, I went through my edgy teenage atheist phase. Luckily, before the Internet was a thing. If the Internet as it exists today was around when I was a kid, I would probably be a Sargon fan. Like, that's. I. I'm like, mortified thinking about that.
-
Unknown C
The Four Horsemen of the atheist apocalypse.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Oh, yeah. But, you know, I went through my teenage atheist phase and then I sort of grew out of it and I was just like, live and let live. I Don't really care. Blah, blah. But then in the last, like, five years, you know, with QANON and. And that kind of stuff, I'm like, you know, I kind of think, like, the religion stuff needs to be toned back a little bit.
-
Unknown B
Religion and politics being together, not good. Very scary stuff comes out of it.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, I don't want to be that edgy teenage atheist again, because insofar preferable, but there's definitely some creep going on there and that I would like to see halted.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I agree.
-
Unknown A
And to clarify, I'm sweating because the AC is broken, not because I'm nervous.
-
Unknown B
Not because you insulted me and my religion.
-
Unknown A
Sitting here like, oh, my gosh, I probably look so terrible.
-
Unknown B
You don't. You look good. Okay, cool. Should I do. Yeah. Shout out. So we have a Patreon, guys, if you enjoy the content that we do, we have a whole bunch of new benefits that I'm sure you guys have been made aware of. And if you haven't, we've got three new tiers. The first tier gives you access to all the behind the scenes. So after this episode, Steve and I will sit down and kind of talk about what we thought about the episode. You can get that there. As well as early access and release to all of these episodes. The second tier allows you access to our unique discord just started this month, but we're hoping to have basically AMA with guests who can't fly out. Steve and I will interview them, and then you guys can actually come on and ask them questions yourselves.
-
Unknown B
And the third level is team member that allows you to join us kind of behind the scenes when we have staff meetings and whatnot. You can tune in, give your ideas, give your opinions. Join the Patreon. If you enjoy what we do.
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Unknown C
Cool.
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Unknown A
Thanks for having me.
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Unknown B
Thanks for coming on. Yeah, appreciate it. Salud.
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Unknown A
As soon as I said the religion thing, I was like, oh, no, I just walked into that and now I have to commit.
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Unknown B
If it makes you feel. Most of our viewers, I think, are pretty staunch atheists, so they're going to be, like, championing you.
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Unknown A
I see. Okay.
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Unknown B
If anything, they're going to be like, oh, I hate when she brings up that she's religious. It's like her one boon. Or wait, Bane. The news is divided ground News puts it back together so you can see how many sources are reporting on any breaking story, where they fall on the political spectrum, how reliable they are, and who owns them. Compare headlines and read full articles to see which details are prioritized, exaggerated or left out entirely because the more we understand the media, the more we'll understand each other. Visit Ground News to learn more.